


World Enough and Time

by seraphim_grace



Series: Angel 'Verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Ancient Egyptian Literature & Mythology, F/M, Lord of the Rings, M/M, Other, Seven Deadly Sins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-12
Updated: 2010-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-08 21:54:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 56,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/seraphim_grace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean has returned from his Road trip and he's different, but that's okay, Sam has changed too</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which Sam is aware of the seduction of the Darkness within him, and Bobby’s books offer little hope.

[](http://s11.photobucket.com/user/seraphim_grace/media/darkjess_zps88d89cc2.jpg.html)  
Original art by Keire_ke

The first time Sam manifested a Darkling he emptied both barrels of Dean's favorite shotgun into its face. This just caused two more to appear and laugh at the first's misfortune as it slammed both hands over its mouth and yelled "by dose, by dose". It was also when Sam realized that he wasn't getting rid of them that easily.

It was a spindly little green creature with huge eyes and a larger mouth. It was basically humanoid and wore a little red waistcoat. It took weeks to realise that they were a manifestation of this new thing within him, that it was manifesting to serve him.

They were the first manifestation of the whispering dark. There had been many others since then.

Next came the voice, whispering in the dark places of his neck and hair. It called him Sammy and made him promises of control and order in a voice that sounded like twenty voices all melded into one and slightly out of time with each other.

By the time Dean returned from Hell, Sam had gotten used to sleeping with the lights on.

It didn't like the light, and dwelled in the dark places, in the shadows of his skin, and it hungered, but it had its uses it was quick to show him. It could exorcise a demon faster than his psychic powers. It could throw a body like it was a piece of paper.

Without another name to give it, he calls it the Darkness and it calls him Sammy just like Dean does.

***

Bobby's house is as close to a home as Sam has ever known.

Dean lives and breathes in the Impala, it's his sanctuary, but it has always been someone else's space to Sam: his dad's car and then his brother's. Just like his time with Jess was felt as if it was someone else's life, lived in someone else's apartment. But, Bobby's house is home.

Even if Bobby does make him sleep on the couch in the parlor because the rest of the house is full of books and so much other magic esoterica that not even Bobby knows what half of it is.

The books more than Bobby, more than the place, make it home.

Sam has always been at ease surrounded by knowledge. It reassures him in ways that people, that places can't. There are more pleasures to be found, he knows, between the pages of a grimoire than there is in the flesh.

Disturbingly the Darkness agrees.

He sits at the kitchen table, a large mug of coffee and a copy of the Red Dragon in front of him. It's old and easy to understand, but sometimes even the most pointless books can prove useful in the right light. Sam doesn't care, he reads it and catalogues it in his memory, in the Darkness' memory just in case because it learns what he learns, because you could never know.

Dean has been missing for two months.

It has been two months since Dean just drove off in the middle of the afternoon, leaving Sam in the midst of a hunt, without a word.

He's phoned three times since then. It's not their longest separation, but it feels longer than when he was in Hell where there time apart had no defined end. Sam seethes with the feel of it.

In the shadows the Darkness within him languishes and lashes.

Bobby has gone to town, complaining about the amount of food that Sam eats, but Sam sees the kid on the stoop and wonders how much food Bobby slips her too.

The Darkness doesn't like her, so Sam doesn't either. It's animosity leeches over between them. She just sits there, with Lacey beside her and watches the road.

Dean phoned late yesterday morning, saying that he was on his way back. That whatever he had had to do, he had done. That he had made his decisions.

Part of Sam really doesn't care anymore.

He fills the void left by family with information, with magic, with seals, with law, with crappy Star Trek novels stolen from libraries when he was a kid and read over and over until the binding fell apart and pages would get left in Des Moines, with others in Boise.

Then another library and another book that he thought that no one would miss.

The other part of him loves his brother to distraction and can't think without him there.

The Darkness whispers, assures him that this is natural, that it wants, that it needs, that he should take, but Sam's not sure what that means, not yet.

The Darkness is old.

Books mention it in asides, in footnotes, in references to other references: the Creeping Dark, the Whispering Dark, the Great Dark.

Bobby has one of the greatest supernatural libraries in the world and nothing there mentions this voice, these creatures, these hungers and the spiraling feeling of being out of control.

Sam calls it the Darkness because it's the only name he can give it. Nothing else quite seems to fit.

It tells him that no one will love him as it does.

It tells him that no one will need him as it does.

It promises him everything.

It promises him Lilith's head bloody on a platter.

It promises him the end of the Apocalypse with blood and horror and fire and control .

It promises him the death of the demons.

It promises him Ruby.

It promises him Jess.

It promises him Dean .

And all he has to do is turn off the lights.

What terrifies him is that it can make its promises come true. What little he knows about this thing that has infested within him, the more he knows that that its pledges are true.

***

It found him in Nazareth, North Texas, back when he was still torturing demons for information to get Dean from Hell.

Bobby had given him the info on the hunt. Bodies were turning up torn apart with their hearts missing, which normally suggested werewolves, but there were sightings of great black snakes devouring parts of the corpses and small imp like creatures.

Bobby admitted he didn't know what the fuck it was and Sam was to be prepared for the worst. Bobby warned him it might be one of the lesser Hell Spawn, a creature greater than any demon, that was tearing through the town.

It wasn't.

The kid was twenty one at the most, with half of his head wide open to the elements, his brain pulsing wetly in a pool of street light. His hands pulling at the hair that was left as he screamed "Just make it stop! Just make it stop, just make it stop!"

And it did.

The boy just fell over, like a puppet with its strings severed and just behind him for the first time Sam heard it's voice, "See ya, Billy," and it's voice was a mismatch of discord and rhyme, of women, of men, of children, of death exhalations and birthing screams, and then his name, "Sammy."

He whirled around, shotgun at the ready, but there was nothing there.

The murders stopped that night.

Sam meets Ruby just outside of town and they leave, after all whatever it was is gone.

Sam always thinks, looking back, that it should have been apocalyptic - that the skies should have opened - that the ground should have creaked and moaned.

Nothing happened, and it was days later that the Darklings first manifested and he opened fire on them with both salt laden barrels of Dean's favorite shotgun.

With Bobby in town the primary three Darklings, the ones he privately refers to as the 'usual suspects,' are milling about in the shadows of the house.

One brings him books, and drinks his coffee. Another lies under the table reading a fourteenth-century book of recipes, lusting at the naked ladies in the illuminations, and the third is in the cupboard complaining that there is nothing to eat here, and can't they just eat the kid . . .

Sam thinks that there is cold meatloaf in the fridge, and mustard, and bread, but if the Darkling opens the door it will turn to dust.

If an angel filled this room with light, all three Darklings would turn to ash.

They are deathless, relentless, and cruel, but vanish into nothingness when someone switches on the light.

They are nameless, infinite, and he suspects there may be more of them than he can count.

Normally, it is just these three creatures that appear, calling him Boss, cracking crude jokes and trying, in their own impish way, to make his life easier, to serve him, to please him.

He still can't get them to leave him alone.

The book is boring him, the Darklings are amusing themselves like a pack of movie gremlins, and he's waiting for them to start singing "Hi ho," just because.

Dean is on his way back.

Sam's thoughts turn to the child that calls herself Ezraqueel, an angel's name, but other than general disdain the thing inside her couldn't care less for her, even if it tried.

Her human body interests the Darkness, because it's hungry and she's convenient. "They use corpses," it whispers, "it won't feel a thing, kid's already dead," and at the back of his throat he can taste her blood, hot sweet and metallic, and the slip slide of something large slide down his throat. It's the Darkness remembering what it feels like to gulp down a human heart.

"We're so hungry," it's a whisper and he is caught.

It's an angel, she's not a civilian, not a child, and it's a vessel, and the light is starting to fade, it wouldn't matter if it took a long time, because she's already dead. She's just meat and it's hungry.

So very, very, hungry.

Any action that he might have taken is cut short when a battered white Chevy Nova pulls into the yard with a familiar flourish, looking out of place with the unfamiliar car. Dean has returned, and done so with the usual handbrake turn and a screech of Die Hard the Hunter.

The kid'll never know just how lucky she is and how close she came to being meat for the beast.

Dean gets out of the car and a lumbering dog exits behind him looking like some spider monster from one of Dean's old b-movies, the ones that cram themselves into tiny holes and emerge in a flurry of long spindly legs.

A million and ten words go through Sam's head, but when he stands up all he says is, "I missed you."

And Dean looks good, better than he has in months, better than he did that first time Sam opened the door to him after he returned from Hell - that time that Sam failed to save him from Hell - but he still has that haunted, shadowed look that screams "I have seen, I have seen."

Then Dean speaks, "Man, you look like shit. Did you eat at all when I was gone?" Not an apology, not an explanation for his absence, just that doubled faced worrying that Dean does that makes Sam feel like he's failed. "If I find out you are under another one of those starving to death curses and Bobby didn't deal with it, I'm going to kick his ass."

Within Sam the Darkness lashes, he can feel it like a great serpent inside a backyard pool, thick with slime and ordure, choked with vine, like something from a Lovecraftian nightmare. His entire body tenses to hold it back, to rein it in. "You don't get to judge," he mutters.

Terrified that Dean will feel the thing move under his skin he pushes his brother away and damn near runs inside.

It's been so hard to hide this from Dean since his brother returned from Hell and two months on its stronger, it wants more, and it's so god damn hungry. Perry, the Darkling with no nose, the first one who ever appeared, is sitting in a shadow on the stairs, "You okay, boss, you wants me and the boys to," he gestures obscenely, an intimate violent gesture.

"Don't you touch him," Sam snarls, "he belongs to me."

The Darkling, Perry, shrugs, "If you wadt, boss, do skin off by dose," and in the shadows behind him another one laughs.

*****

The next time he talks to Dean it ends badly.

Dean is trying to explain but what he's saying makes no sense, he talks of oddities and miracles and Frederick Douglass but one of the Darklings is sitting on the bookshelf and it's distracting Dean.

He's not supposed to be able to see it.

He never did before.

It makes things more complicated. It means Sam has to work harder to keep his secret because he knows that if Dean knows about the Darkness he won't hesitate to do whatever it takes to make sure Sam stays dead. Two years ago Sam would have been exactly the same.

Two years ago, Sam would have put his own head on the block.

He can't die now.

He has too much left to do. Maybe once they've averted the Apocalypse and Lilith herself leaves a bad taste in the Darkness' mouth. Maybe then he'll let Dean try out some sort of magic and try and destroy him. But he's just so hungry, no matter how much he eats.

Even as Dean is leaning over the prone body of a Darkling, bright pink blood in the twilight gloom, his face and ugly sweater spattered with it, Sam is just so hungry. The Darkling is called Mal, short for Malodorous, it's not dead, Sam knows, just playing dead long enough to get away, because they don't die.

He wants to eat it, to consume it, to swallow its blood and broken bones and brain matter and consume it because he's just so damn hungry.

He's going to have to go into town soon, a couple of stray dogs should make it manageable, should quiet it long enough that he can think.

The last time it was quiet he stopped a rapist in an alley and it tore him apart like paper, swallowing him down in quivering, twitching lumps.

But Dean is kneeling over the darkling and Bobby is there in the doorway and Sam has to react, and he can't recognize the creature. So he says the first things that pop into his mouth. "Dude, you just killed Dobby the House Elf."

****

Sam is woken by the sound of voices in the next room, the room where Dean has crashed.

He can make out maybe one word in three because the two men are muted. Dean is talking to the angel.

He hears the words "grace" and "suppress," because Castiel is louder when he says his S'es, and Dean murmurs something about "talking to you," and then there is a chuckle which could be either of them, and then Dean says "I know," and he sounds resigned.

They talk low and quiet for a few moments and the darkness whispers, "I can hear them, I can show you how." But before Sam can learn this new trick Dean opens the door to reveal that he is alone in the room.

There is a bright red ring of blood around his neck on his tee but his skin is perfectly clean.

"What? Dean? Your neck."

Dean just pulls out the tee and looks at the stain. "Must'a had a nosebleed."

"Is it the angel? I heard him," Sam can't help but accuse, he can feel the Darkness' hatred.

He hates the angel and only part of that hatred is his own. He can taste Ruby's fear of them, with her half a world away, on the back of his tongue like the lingering of vinegar.

"What?" Dean asks, shocked, playing with the bracelet on his wrist, at the stones that jingle jangle there. It's his new nervous tic. "Nah, must have just rolled over unto the dog funny. Is Bobby out of the shower yet?" And as simple as that it's all done with, Dean changes the subject and Sam seethes.

His brother is hiding things from him.

***

They are maybe an hour from Bobby's, in the comfort of the Impala, when Dean pulls into the parking lot and rearranges himself in his jeans, "You think Dunkin' Donuts sells pie? I have the worst sugar craving."

He comes back in with four boxes of a dozen donuts each, and two cups of coffee. He's gotten Sam a bran muffin. And he sits there, as Sam watches with wide eyes, and demolishes them one after another.

It's like something from a freak show.

When he's done he licks the sugar from his fingers in a display that's just obscene, and then eyes Sam's muffin speculatively.

Sam has lost his appetite and just hands it over.

Dean licks off the icing and then eats it, looking at the door to the Dunkin Donuts . "I don't know what's wrong with me today but I could eat that again."

Sam thinks of the amount of sugar he's already eaten and retches. Even the Darkness thinks it might be disgusting and it has fantasies of breaking into the meat counter at Wal-Mart for an all you can eat buffet.

"I found a job," Sam says, still pulling the face as Dean obviously, seriously, considers putting himself into a sugar coma. "Haunted showers. Woman says the ghost pushed her down the stairs and apologized."

"Haunted showers, point the way, Sammy, we're there already." And Dean's grin is so familiar, so comforting, so homey, that Sam decides to ignore the shining white bead batting against the steering wheel of the impala.


	2. In which Sam starts to realize just how high a price the Darkness demands for it’s service

Concrete, Washington has one thing to recommend it, a wishing well that actually works.

It's a job that should be routine: find the source, remove it before someone gets killed, and leave before the dust settles. But Heaven has no rage like a love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned and Sam finds himself struck by lightning in broad daylight where the Darkness cannot protect him.

Death is quick and relatively painless.

Sam wakes up with a start, sucking in breath like he hasn't had the chance to in ten years. The town is different, wrapped in a fog thick enough to pull around him like a blanket.

The sky is leprosy grey.

In the window of a shop beside him, the lettering advertises a fundraiser for Alchemilla Hospital. He didn't think Concrete had its own hospital. The ad talks about an upcoming coffee morning and asks for knitted baby caps. Sam feels lost even as he rubs at his head, where he was sure the lightning struck.

When he breathes out, he exhales a cool mist.

He can hear a dog whining in the distance.

Ahead of him is a girl in a black dress, her long black hair is loose about her shoulders, and she looks back at him, and then runs, barefoot, through the streets. Seeing no one else around, and hearing the ghost of her laughter, Sam gives chase.

When he reaches the alley that she vanished into, she is gone.

He can still hear the mockery of her laughter.

It sounds a lot like Jess' used to.

He runs faster, past the garages, past the dumpsters, and the remains of someone's vomit and he thinks if he can run just a step faster, just a breath, he might catch her. Because it's Jess, it has to be.

Just as he reaches the end of the alley a metal gate, with wire lattice panels, slams shut with a metallic clang and a dog leaps out from nowhere. The Darkness catches it as if it's nothing and then there is blood, splashing hard and hot across his face, and the echoing ghost of Jess' laughter.

 

***

The little girl perches on the garden wall singing "Oranges and Lemons" as she kicks her legs back and forth.

She doesn't have Lilith's demeanor of being old woman in a child's body who's only playing at being young, this girl clearly is a youth. Sam doubts that she's older than six or seven. She looks like Wednesday Addams, in a blue pleated dress and two long black plaits on either side of her head.

"Oranges and lemons sang the bells of St Clemens," she sings as she continues to clack her feet, one after the other in perfect black patent leather shoes and bright white socks, against the stone wall. "You owe me five farthings said the bells of St Martin's." Sam crosses the street so he's next to her. She doesn't stop singing, moving the head of the doll in her hands, "When will you pay me said the bells of Old Bailey?"

"Excuse me," Sam says, stopping beside her, even as tall as he is he's only level with her knees, which are a pale stripe of skin between skirt and sock.

She ignores him, continuing with her song, "When I get rich, says the bells of Shoreditch."

"Excuse me," Sam repeats.

"When will that be, say the bells of Stepney." She is ignoring him.

"I do not know," Sam finishes the rhyme, "say the great bells at Bow."

"I'm not supposed to talk to strangers," the girl says and then, raising her head like an empress at court, she continues to sing but he doesn't know these lines, "two sticks and an apple say the bells of White Chapel."

"I'm looking for a girl, she has black hair. I think she came this way."

"You mean Jess?" The child laughs, "you won't find her. Not here, she'll be at the lighthouse," she smiles to herself like it's the best possible joke, "your Father's quite late, sing the bells of Aldgate."

"She's called Jess?"

"Stupid head, you have to finish the rhyme or the dark things will come," she looks around warily, "you don't want the dark to come, do you? And maids in white aprons sang the bells of St Catherine's." The girl is derisive, and mocking. "Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clemens."

"What happens when I finish the rhyme? Will I find Jess?"

"No," she answers calmly, "You've got to go to the lighthouse, she's waiting there, but the rhyme," she jumps down off the wall, though it must be seven feet high, out of sight, leaving him with the last lines of the rhyme. "Here comes the chopper to chop off your head, chip-chop chip-chop and the last man is dead."

He hears the rustling of her running through the grass and she is gone.

***

The bells ring out in a cacophony, each one starting at a different time from a different direction in the fog.

Sam feels like he's been walking for hours.

Time doesn't seem to feel right in this place, like sound, it is dampened by the ever present fog.

She collides into him like a football tackle, a mess of curls and stained fabric, "Run!" she shouts pulling him by the hand, "the dark is coming, run!" She has him in a death grip and isn't letting go, pulling him so hard he has to run to keep up with her. "Run!" She repeats, "we've got to get inside!"

She fumbles at the door of one of the houses with the key, scratching the lock before she manages to get it open, pulling him inside as the bells toll. She wedges the door shut. All the other doors in the hallway are nailed closed with great boards over them. "Come on," she says again, "the dark is coming. You don't want to be caught in it."

She has a nest under the house, hidden behind the washer and drier, piled high with stinking blankets and abandoned food wrappers. She is spindly grey and smells of sour milk. Her hair is matted and she guides him into her nest and in the back of his head the darkness whispers, "Won't you come into my parlour said the spider to the fly."

 

Sam wakes to the feel of the woman's hand over his mouth. She has a hooded lantern on the floor between them, and her the index finger of her other hand pressed to her lips.

So, he listens.

There are soft even footfalls outside, a weight landing on metal grills and behind him, there is the sound of metal dragging against metal. It's as if someone is walking patiently, listening, and then pulling a point behind them.

He must have been snoring if she is so adamant that he be quiet. She nods seeing that he understands and lays one of her blankets over the lantern so that her little nest is shrouded in black.

He is suddenly hyper aware of the sound of the knife dragging on the concrete in the street, the footfalls, the erratic beating of her heart and the sickly sweet stink of her.

He can't help but think that the footsteps are coming closer.

Sam sinks back into the foul smelling blankets, feeling safe, arrogant in the Darkness, and goes back to sleep.

He wakes this time to a wet mewling followed by a terrible splash. Then he hears footsteps, slowly climbing the stairs out of the basement they're hiding in.

Whoever the woman is, she's gone.

The walls are tainted with rust and corruption and the floor tiles are lifted in places.

There is a bloodstain and mess of meat all over the open floor.

Written across the wall in some dark liquid, thick brush strokes is a message.

in my restless dreams i see that town,  
you promised you'd take me there again someday  
but you never did  
well i'm alone there now  
in our special place  
waiting for you.

The message is punctuated by a bloody handprint. A woman's handprint.

He knows the handwriting, he'd know it anywhere, it belongs to Jess.

Sam opens the door but instead of the foggy street of the town he has found himself in it's the Chinese restaurant and Wes is standing there looking lost and a dark haired girl who looks at him without recognising either of them.

"I'm not done with you yet," the Darkness whispers in his ear, and it has Jess' voice and it's as if she is standing behind him, draped along his shoulder, reaching up on her tip toes so that her mouth is right beside his ear, "My dear, dear Sammy-boy."

And running through his head is the rather jaunty tune of "Oranges and lemons."


	3. In which Sam looks at his brother through the eyes of the Dark

Dean is lying on his back on the motel bed holding aloft a Nintendo game system and cursing at it in Latin about cheating bastards and evil conspiracies. "You fucking cheating little dinosaur bastard!"

Sam thinks Dean must have gotten the machine in those two months they spent apart. Sam doesn't know what he's playing. Only that he is sprawled across the bed in only a pair of black jockey shorts cursing at the thing which is bright red.

Sam is filling in his journal. He's not archaic enough to write it by hand, it's posted online on a page called Livejournal under the username "dejuramortis." It keeps his darkest thoughts and secrets, like a true hunter's journal should, the fact that it's online keeps it that more secure from Dean who would only find it if he thought it offered him porn.

Dean looks like a porn star at the moment and Sam thinks that he should be used to it because Dean looks at nudity as a convenient comfort, but not outside the room as that might attract attention.

Dean's a good looking man and he knows it but this isn't about that. It's about having just showered and not caring that his brother might see his thighs and the way they fall invitingly open, or the underside of his arms.

Sam shakes away the thought, he's never looked at Dean like that. Well, other than that small crush he had when he was a teenager and that was just normal. They lived in each other's skin and he had never done anything about it. He outgrew it.

Now Dean is lying on the bed, drops of water from the shower caught in the hairs of his arms and he smells of motel shower gel and there are new places on his body that Sam doesn't know.

There's a hickey on the back of his knee, almost faded to nothing, and Sam wants to put his mouth there and suck a mark all of his own over the place so Dean knows that he belongs only to Sam.

 

Sam shrugs away the thought, checking his emails to distract himself. Apart from the usual spam and a few advertisements in Russian, there is nothing new.

With an "Ooomph," Dean turns over unto his belly to show a perfect parabola formed by his back, ass and thighs.

In the pool of shadows under the table Dark Jess sits, wearing a gown of utter blackness and she looks innocent, there only for Sam to see. She uncoils herself in a gliding motion that isn't even close to human so that she is wrapped around his shoulders.

"You love him," she whispers and her hair is like the tongue of a snake in the curve of his ear, "take him. Take what's yours."

He bats her away with his hand, because she's wrong, he doesn't want Dean like that - does he?

No, it's just been too long.

He hasn't seen Ruby in weeks, and has had no relief other than his own hand in the shower. Dean is a good looking man, that's all it is.

"Want," Jess made from Darkness whispers, "need," her breath is a tantalizing wet warmth, "take," she bites his lobe and Sam jumps, knocking the chair over.

"What?" Dean asks, still in his jockey shorts and sun warmed skin.

"Fucking spider!" Sam lies, dropping one of Bobby's heavy books on the floor, "Could have taken on Tokyo."

Dean's laugh is a low chuckle in the well of his chest.

"Man, it was a supernatural creature in its own right," Sam continues with the defensive lie. The darkness thinks that this is amusing and manifests as a spider on the linoleum of the motel. "Look!"

Dean's eyes open and on instinct he pulls his bare feet out of the way. "Okay," he says through the chuckling. "Monster Zero deserves a jump, now kill it already, or do you want the holy water and silver bullets to make sure?"

Sam steps on it, and he can hear the spider go "Please, I have kids to support," because the darklings can never resist the opportunity to snark.

"It's just a spider, Dean."

Dean smirks, "That spider, Sammy boy, it could have taken passengers. It's a terrible threat to hunters worldwide, and I know that I, for one, will sleep soundly knowing it was slain by the foot of the mighty Gigantor."

"Jerk."

"Bitch," Dean reacts maintaining his smugness, then shifts his attention back to the game console, "Okay you little cheating dinosaur bastard." And just like that the moment's over and Sam can imagine the taste of his brother on his tongue, salty sweet and sour with the lingering tang of incense.

***

The water in the shower is a tepid dribble, and the showerhead is level with his chin, so he has to crouch to be able to wet the top of his head. There's not quite enough shampoo in the tiny bottles and the stall is so small that he can barely move around enough to pick up another one.

If someone told him, in ignorance, that hunting was glamorous he would cite three examples to the contrary: sitting with Dean in the Impala for days, the pair of them stinking through the long drive with the air con on high. Greasy diner food that repeats no matter how you wash it down. And showers like this.

There are other things of course, the blood that you can't get out from under your fingernails, the lingering stink of goblins that gets into your clothes, the series of endless nameless fucks in bars you can't remember the name of.

The loneliness.

It's not the horrors of the job that wear them down.

It's the banality.

Sam thinks of Abraham Van Helsing who after having killed the vampire, drank himself to death in some Victorian tavern. Or maybe he'd hung himself.

What was left to live for when your nemesis was gone.

When you kill the monster all that's left is the hunt and the boredom.

Maybe he never had a home to go back to.

The hero should die with the monster, Sam knows, but they don't. They go on, in cheap motels with crappy showers, and greasy diner foods and Metallica's black album for the ten thousandth time and that's the true horror.

Sam's tired, but he can't stop. His monster isn't dead yet.

Somewhere a little girl torments a family while inside she screams and screams and screams because she doesn't want to, but there is a darkness inside of her. That darkness took Dean away from him, did Hell alone knows what to him, and for that she has to suffer.

She'll pay.

"He's going out, Boss," one of the darklings, Jeremy says, he's perched on top of the shower stall's glass panels. He's wearing a shower cap and has a back scrubbing brush that's far too small for anything but himself. "Want us to go with?"

"Yes," Sam says turning to look at the creature, "don't let him see you, though, report back to me if he does anything dangerous."

He climbs out of the shower, over the edge of the bath that is too small for anything but a child, and stands on the mat, drying himself off with a towel that feels like a cross between sandpaper and a sheet.

Jess sits on the toilet, lid down, and the darkness makes a dress out of her, and he can see it move, and blink and watch him. "You don't need him now," she says and her hands skim her sides, her hair roiling about her head because she is a construct. "You have me."

"You're not real."

She laughs. "Everything's real, Sammy. So why not? We have the room to ourselves," she opens her arms, "or don't you want me anymore, Sam? I can make it so good."

He turns away but when he looks at her in the mirror it's not Jess, it's Dean in the black fabric and it answers with Dean's voice. "I can be anything you want me to be, if you just want me."

"Make yourself useful," Sam tells it, though his mouth is dry and his tongue swollen. "Find me Lilith."

When it laughs, it's with Jess' voice which he's missed with a hunger he cannot describe. "Don't you love me anymore, Sam? I can make it so good, but I'm hungry, Sam. I'm so hungry." She stands up and cups his cheek and he can't help but lean into her hand though it's corpse cold, because it's Jess. "I'm waiting for you, Sam, in our special place, but I'm so hungry, I can give you everything, but I'm so hungry."

Sam bends down and kisses her.

He doesn't know what she is, but at least she's never boring.

***

Dean picks the icing off his piece of cake, the diner didn't serve pie, and is eating it in tiny chunks. There is a crumb of desiccated coconut just to the left side of his mouth that Sam wants to reach up and wipe off. In fact he has the urge to take a wet wipe and wash his brother's face.

Dean isn't a messy eater but Sam suddenly wants to put him in his place, to treat him like a child, because he's behaving like one with his cake.

He's doing it deliberately because there is a pretty waitress, who can't be more than sixteen, making googly eyes at him.

Dean won't do anything about it, but he's letting her watch.

If pressed he'd say he's being generous, because if they came back this way in five, ten years, she wouldn't even look at Dean, and for now, she can look all she wants.

Of course, if she was five or ten years older he'd be all over her like a rash.

Dean's like a dog in heat around girls that could pass for pretty.

He even tried it with Jess.

It's one of those things that Sam hangs onto when he's not pissed at Dean.

Since he's returned from his little sabbatical Dean is glowing like L'Oreal- would-commit-murder-to-bottle-that-glow glowing.

He looks haunted and chiseled as if something truly nasty lurks behind his eyes, and his eyes have been like that since Hell, but he looks healthy now, and no longer washed out. Whatever happened when he drove left, Dean looks better for it.

When Sam presses him on it Dean just tells him about this mad old woman in New York State and a gay bar in Chicago.

Sam doesn't believe him.

He has his own ideas of what happened. He thinks it has to do with the angel and the hickeys and he doesn't want to think what's going on. Dean's belongs to Sam, he'll share him with random women because then he stays with Sam, but the angel is a threat.

Dean is a soldier; a weapon; a hunter. Dean lives to protect Sam, to hunt, everything he has done is for Sam. Dean went to Hell for Sam. The angel threatens that.

The angel makes Dean want things that have nothing to do with Sam.

Dean's not allowed to want - he belongs to Sam. He can want only what Sam wants him to want.

Sam shakes that train of thought from his head, washing it away with coffee burned in the percolator and scalded by ineptitude.

It's bitter and thin.

Dean is still playing with the cake although it's dry. There is a napkin between them upon which Dean has scribbled some sort of weird design with a blue ballpoint pen.

Over dinner, he told Sam a joke about two angels that made Sam blush. It's the sort of joke Dean tells, but not about angels. He said he was told it by an elderly lady who looked like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. He adds that she's the one who knit the sweater which was left in Bobby's because it's really too heavy for automated launderettes to do anything but disintegrate and takes nearly a day to drip dry.

Sam has one of his own, and just before they left Bobby's a parcel showed up with a third one, all cables and heavy knots, with a card pinned to it: For Robert from Magdalene Al'Ein'Dhor. The return address is New York State.  
There were some books wrapped in the sweater, and Bobby damn near had Dean at gunpoint to get her address so he could call around. Dean just laughed and said she knew Bobby was handy with a hammer and nails and just wanted him to help her out in the house.

For the books she had given him Bobby was more than welcome to take the road trip. Sam didn't even recognize the language that they were in.

Sam feels left out and he doesn't like it. They all have secrets, he knows, but he'll find them out.

And Dean is sitting there just playing with his cake and grinning at the waitress like she has a hope in Hell and Sam puts his hand in his pocket, throws change down on the table, enough to pay for the meal. "I'll wait for you in the car."

Sam has research to do; he wants to find Alchemilla Hospital, because he suspects that where the answers are.

***

Local libraries in small out of the way towns often have books that they shouldn't have. Old tomes bequeathed by some strange old native that live in the wrong place on the shelves and Hunters worldwide always visit and liberate them.

Sometimes they're mixed in with cook books, sometimes with philosophy, one turned up in foreign languages. Sam's seen it all, so when Jeremy finds one in the children's section, stuck at the back of the shelf behind Winnie the Pooh and Where the Wild Things Are Sam's only surprised that it's not covered in crayon.

He gives it to Jeremy to put in the satchel he's wearing because librarians on the whole don't question piranha faced gremlins who are stealing from their library.

Outside it's raining hammers and nails and Sam doesn't want to go back to the Motel yet, it doesn't even have wifi, but the library is closing. Other than the small grimoire, it's a bust.

It's ten minutes back to the motel with the photocopies he's made wedged into his laptop bag, and the air has that March chill that seeps in through clothes.

Even the birds are quiet.

He climbs the steps, sloughing off water with each tread. Jeremy, he can recognize some of the imps by sight now, Perry most of all for having no nose, looks as bedraggled as he does and it makes Sam laugh because he's wearing a little plastic cape and hat, and instead of the usual combat boots he has gumboots. It's almost cute.

When he reaches the door to the room he shares with Dean he stops because Dean is not alone. "It is not that you don't understand," Castiel says, "it's that you don't have a frame of reference that you might understand."

"I'm fed up of you calling me stupid," Dean answers.

Sam waits because it sounds like his brother and the angel are fighting and he wants to hear this.

"I am not, you are far from it. It is merely that we cannot find something which we both understand that I can explain these things to you." Sam waits for an answer but it's Castiel that continues. "The failure is mine, not yours."

But Dean is stubborn. "Then why me?"

"You think too little of yourself, Dean, you were chosen because you are good."

Dean scoffs at that. "I've done things, bad things."

"Really?" the Angel asks, "what have you done? You have stolen to fund hunting, never for personal gain. You have caused pain only to save future anguish. If only all men were as righteous as you. You are the best of them."

"I'm not, what about Sam? What about Dad? Weren't they good enough for you?"

"No," Castiel answers, "they fight for revenge, for control, only you fight because it needs to be done without claiming anything for yourself."

"You're wrong." Dean says and there is some thudding. "I'm not what you think I am. I'm not worth it."

"The price was mine to pay," Castiel says and he sounds sad. "And I would pay it again. Nothing happens, Dean, without consequence. The bargain was made, once the conditions were met I took you from Hell because they were my orders, because you are a good man."

"And which demon did you make the deal with, Cas?" Sam can almost see his brother, "that Crossroads bitch."

Sam doesn't recognize the word that Castiel answers with, but Dean makes a noise like he's been stabbed.

"Her conditions were explicit." Castiel continues when really he should shut up, Dean isn't going to take this. "We had to wait until they were met, and then we carried you up to be one of us, to be our champion, our Savior."

"You rescued the wrong guy."

"Dean, I tire of your inability to see your own worth. You cannot see how brightly it is that you shine. The price was too high, but I would pay it a thousand times over."

"And what was it?" Dean is pressing. For some reason the air around the door feels warmer. Sam doesn't know why.

"That you make that final cut." Castiel says and his tone is dark. "She wanted to see you break."

"I broke long before then," Dean answers in a quiet, knife sharp voice.

"No," Castiel says, "you didn't. Reality is fluid in Hell, especially for someone as powerful as she is. You made the cut because you thought that you had made all those before it. She is the Queen of Pain, it dances in her hair and lurks in the shadows of her eyes. That you break was her price, Dean, and that watch you." There is a period if quiet. "But your humanity poisons you so that to you reality is fixed and so you cannot understand that just because something is real doesn't mean that it did or didn't happen the way you saw it. Memory is tricky."

"So now I remember it wrong." Dean says, just picking the fight because he only has two answers to anything, fight or flight. He's fighting rather than coiling in on himself, Sam knows it doesn't matter what Castiel says now, Dean is going to argue. "I remember that horror wrong because you say so? I did those things, Cas, whether you want me to have done them or not. You tell me everything I did was preordained because I'm some sort of prophesied Savior and I'm not, I'm just," he is quiet for a moment, and Sam can imagine him breathing, just breathing in and out to control his temper. "I can't be, you've got the wrong guy. . ." there is another long pause as Dean just gets more and more stubborn. "Just get out, and," Sam waits for it, "and don't come back. I don't want to see you again. I'll fight your damn war, I'll even be your damn savior, because it needs to be fought not because you ask me to."

Sam can't swear to it but he thinks he can smell smoke.

"And that is why you were chosen, Dean," Castiel says when he should really know how to shut up and he shouldn't sound so fond, so pleading. "Because you are the best of us all. You can choose and your choice redeems us. You are without taint so we can trust you to choose righteously."

Dean clearly throws something, or knocks it to the floor, because Sam hears it crash and then that distinctive flapping quilt sound that tells him the angel is gone.

Sam takes a deep breath, then a second, then a third. He makes heavy footfalls outside the door because it wouldn't do for Dean to know that he overheard him.

Dean sits on the bed wearing only his jeans. He has his hand in his hair and is tugging hard. "Hey, Sam," he says plastering on his biggest, fakest grin, "how was the book hunting?"


	4. In which Sam sees the world through the Dark

Ruby likes a little blood in their bed play.

She likes Sam to be rough and was the one to suggest that he blindfold her, with the knives lying on the bedside cabinet.

Sam learned quickly how to get blood without incapacitating her, although he suspects that she wouldn't care. Deep scratches that well prettily and the metallic tang of it on his tongue. It's gone long past blood-play, he knows that, because the Darkness drinks her down like ambrosia and when he does this it is quiet for days at a time.

Ruby's blood feeds its hunger.

Sam's not sure whether it's because she's a demon or if any blood would do, but Ruby has her advantages. She's sitting there on the bed, drinking orange juice and taking iron supplements and he wonders if he hasn't taken a little too much this time.

Her nakedness is crisscrossed with cuts. She seems to enjoy them, rubbing her tongue over the one that bisect her lips. "Hmmm," she says sprawling back on the bed, "a girl could get used to this. I might have to get you some special razor blades."

"Flechettes," Sam corrects automatically. There are knives directly designed for blood play.

"Of course, anything for my Sam." Her breasts are loose on her chest, big enough to fall outwards and her pubic hair is matted with sweat, blood and other fluids.

There is a matrix of shallow cuts on the inside of her arm, never where they can be seen, that's their deal, but anywhere else that can be covered is scored by little marks. Ruby likes the pain and Sam wants the blood.

It's a perfect agreement.

His cock is still sticky, but the Darkness looks at the way she's sprawled out, breasts falling, thighs akimbo because the muscles don't want to close yet and licks his lips. "Cover your eyes," he says.

She does this because she thinks that this is his get out of jail free card, that if he can't see her eyes he's not doing this. The truth is it's so that she can't see the Darkness manifest when he fucks her.

Ruby likes it when he hurts her, so when the Darkness manifests as tentacles with teeth to bite into her, she squirms delightedly. Her cunt is slick and shining in the poor light as she parts her thighs. Her stomach is slightly rounded, the flesh pursed, and her skin forms creases at her knees.

Sam likes this about her.

Jess was perfect, toned, and sculpted.

But this new meat suit spent years on her back and it's rounded, soft, and it bruises pleasantly under his thumbs. It makes it more pleasing to touch her, to clutch her to feel the softness beneath his thumbs.

Dean says that this body looks like that girl from High School Musical, and Sam admits that it adds a certain vicarious thrill to fucking her.

Her jeans are on the floor, tiny little things, because this host is tiny in comparison to him. Her shoes can fit in his hand and he can lift her like she's a doll. He throws her about like she's made of rags and she likes that too.

If it's a kink it's harmless enough.

He crawls up between her thighs with the Darkness exploding from his spine. It curls around her as his palms wrap around her thighs, pulling her down, and pressing the head of his cock against her, feeling it slick as he pushes between her buttocks. But nothing in him responds yet as the Darkness picks at the scratches, as his hands move to her flanks, pushing up, then up over the fall of her breasts.

Her nipples are rough against his palm. He uses the creases of his skin, where the skin is driest, and pushes up so that her breasts pull against his skin and drops, the skin tightened and then released. A few of the cuts open against the pressure and the blood wells up in bright black beads and he lowers his mouth and laps it up.

The sex is fun, but this is what he really desires – the blood that pearls against her skin and tastes sweetly metallic against his tongue. He'll give her what she wants because it means she gives him this.

The sex is okay, but the blood quiets the Darkness and its inexorable hunger and that alone is worth a King's ransom.

************

The door is meant to open to West Kansas, instead it opens to a small town that could be anywhere and is completely drenched in fog. The sign to his side says "Blue Creek Apartments" but the vacancy light is busted and it flashes up the words "NO" and "ANY."

Sam's not sure what he did this time but he's back in the town of his nightmare from Concrete, the town with the wishing well.

The Darkness is playing with him and this place is its game.

Sam doesn't know the rules, but he'll play anyway.

He doesn't really have a choice.

He tries to listen, but the fog muffles sound and light. The darkness is coiled around him like a mass of black serpents.

Not sure what else to do, he walks.

He remembers from the last time - Jess is here, waiting, at their special place. He doesn't know where it is. He never came here before the Darkness brought him. He just knows that if he finds her she'll give him what he wants. The Darkness knows what that is, even if he doesn't.

Under his breath, he starts to sing "Oranges and Lemons" but he can't remember all of the words, just the last few lines. "Here comes the candle to light you to bed, and here comes the axe to chop of your head, chip chop chip chop and the last man is dead."

The door behind him is locked, although it was open when he first stepped through it, and there is a small blue gate that is banging in a nonexistent wind. It's obviously the right way to go.

The sidewalk feels weird under Sam's feet, it's spongy and his knees object to it. It's like walking on a bog so he steps out onto the road, but it's the same. When he turns to walk the other way, the tarmac solidifies and it's easy to walk once again.

Whatever it is that is playing with him, it has defined rules.

He raises his head and walks to the east. There is a dumpster in the middle of the intersection so Sam follows the path laid out for him and walks north. At the end of that road is a boardwalk leading out towards some kind of lake. Turning east, he starts to walk again.

There are signs on the shops, because this is clearly a main thoroughfare, but he can't read them and he's not sure why.

Sam follows the path along the lake, he can hear and smell the water but with the fog it might as well be a world away. He walks for what feels like hours when he steps into a tunnel.

The Darkness is wonderfully familiar as it rushes up to envelope him. It is like slipping into his own bed, with his own smell and pre-warmed by his own heft, after leaving it on a cold winter's morning for a short piss.

It is warm and soft and comfortable, and it wraps around him like tendrils of fog.

The figure lumbers out of the fog with a shriek. It looks like a teenager in a hooded sweatshirt, if they had tucked their arms into the body of the fabric; instead they are physically grafted into their stomach. The face of it has slipped and lies in folds around its neck but it still manages to scream. And as if it wore a hood there is no hair or ears to the deformed head.

The Darkness purrs, and the sound of it vibrates against his skin, up around his head and over his eyes but he can still see the thing. Every bone in his body is screaming of its wrongness. He lifts his arm and unleashes the Darkness in one cool smooth motion. "Eat."

It manifests as Jess, as the darklings, as tentacles, and a new manifestation, a porcelain doll with jet black eyes and ringlets clothed in a soft blue satin dress, that he knows, the way he always knows with the Darkness, is called Daisy Ray.

The darklings tear the monster into meat in a matter seconds, using their teeth, their hands and their feet, claw and muscle just shredding the thing to pieces. What ichors seep from the creature is splattered over Sam and it's absorbed by the Darkness as it feeds.

Jess is kneeling on the pavement in the tunnel, her dress seething over her, baring parts of her honey colored skin, but her face is in the thing's stomach, biting into the meat, and it's over her mouth and down her neck.

Sam wants to be disgusted but he's not.

Daisy Ray steps over in her delicate little patent leather shoes and holds out her jointed fingers. In them are the creature's eyes, ripped out with their tendons and nerves still attached. "For you, boss," she says quietly, "unless you want his balls instead."

"It's fine," Sam tells her though he wants to retch, watching the darklings with their piranha sharp mouths, Jess using her hands, hands that caressed and loved him, bring the meat to her mouth and bite into it, like it was pizza slice.

Sam just stands there as they feed, after all, it doesn't take very long and it's the first time in a long time since the Darkness hasn't been so very hungry. Its hunger was devouring him and if eating this creature eases that need he will feed it a hundred such monsters. It's not like it's human.

When they are done, they stand up and Daisy Ray wipes her porcelain lips and a painted little tongue darts out to catch the blood at the corner of her mouth. The others are gone. Then wiping her hands down on her skirt she lifts her arms out to be carried.

Sam adjusts her bonnet and then checks for blood spatter before he lifts her. She has surprising heft in his arms. "Never alone," she croons in his ear, like a sleepy child, fed to the point of bloating, "Never alone with our Sammy." She gives him visions then, of other hosts and how she appeared before them and they smashed her china head in with a poker.

Sam doesn't know why he doesn't, except he knows it won't matter.

Death doesn't seem to mean much to the creature within him.

As he leaves the tunnel, as Daisy Ray turns to dust in his arms at the thin sunlight through the fog, he sees the sign. Its been defaced with red paint so that it reads "Welcome to," the original word is missing, "Hell", the e 'Ls' painted on over the letter that was there.

A man is sitting on a bench. "We've been expecting you."

He just shrugs and continues up the road, where he is sure he hears a woman weeping, but then it's gone, and he goes up the hill through the fog to a car park promontory, but he can't see what it overlooks because of the fog.

There is a small building and thinking that this must be his destination Sam heads towards it.

"I wouldn't go in there if I were you," the man says. He's dressed thickly against the cool, damp, mist. He's a tall man with thin sharp features and a rather neutral accent. He could be from anywhere. "Reality is thinnest where there's water. In a place like this you take it into consideration." He stops, "and besides, they're really quite foul."

"I," Sam starts.

"Public toilets," the man continues, reaching into his pocket and pulling out, of all things, a Twinkie, which he unwraps and takes a small bite out of. He chews thoughtfully before he continues. "I always find these places have public toilets, places for water to pool and the dark to leech through, and," he looks around at the cliff wall behind him, at the fence, "I think it's leeching through fine on it's own without the water, wouldn't you say, Sam-I-am?"

Sam jumps because he doesn't know this man and there's no way he should know his name, let alone enough to tease him for it.

"Don't worry, Sam-I-am, I'm not going to eat you." The man stands up, long black wool coat falling to his ankles, suggesting it's custom made because the man is easily as tall as Sam. "I'm only here to appreciate the view."

Sam looks out over the fence but he can only see fog and he says as much.

"Sam, Sam, Sam, you should know as well as most of us - you see what you want to see. Look again."

When Sam turns he can see a crystal grey lake with boats bobbing, the fog is gone. The lake is surrounded by a forest and he can see the outline of old houses through the trees.

Having finished his Twinkie the man puts the wrapper in his pocket. "Why are you here?" Sam presses, "Who are you? What do you want? What is going on with this place, what about the monsters?"

"I told you, kid," the man says, "I'm here for the view . . . and monsters," he laughs, "you see monsters? Better say that to your brother, he might be able to burn away all the impurities if you ask him nicely enough."

"You know Dean?" Sam presses, he's out of his depth and he knows it.

"I know Dean," the man replies, "we met in Chicago, he had some questions, he was more polite about it than you though." He turns away. "But I must be leaving, there is no rest for the wicked after all."

"Who are you?" Sam presses.

The man smiles slowly when he turns his head back. "Call me Reigert." And then he takes two steps towards Sam, "You won't thank me for this," he says and pushes him hard, down over the railing.

Sam wakes up back in the motel room he was sharing with Dean like it was all a bad dream, including everything with Ruby. Dean is talking low and quiet on the phone to someone he is fondly calling "Kiddo," and doesn't notice that Sam's awake.

"Now you go on to bed," Dean says softly, "or you'll be cranky in the morning, and you're not going to solve the mysteries of the universe with a sore head." There is a quiet pause while the other speaks. "I know, Kiddo . . . what was it Wayne told me, we're all heroes in our own movies, but it's up to us to find our own plot. It just means yours is more the Da Vinci Code than most." there is another pause and Dean laughs, soft and fond. "Night night, Kiddo. God bless," and then hangs up, and for a long moment he hangs his head in his hands before he goes to the bathroom.

Sam looks at where Dean was sitting and wonders just how much he knows about his brother now.

But if Dean can keep secrets, so can Sam.


	5. In which Sam tries to convince his brother that the angels are not to be trusted and realizes that Dean knew that anyway.

The last thing that Sam wants is to get tangled up again with the angels.

Heaven's soldiers are bad news, he knows that. He remembers his scriptures where angels were the last resort when God wanted something destroyed and forgotten. If He wanted something wiped off the face of the planet with only a crater left behind He sent an angel. For anything else humanity can cope.

When Ruby shows up at the bar where they're hustling pool, talking about how the demons are trying to get their hands on a girl who can hear the angels talking and Sam doesn't want to get involved. Sam is of the opinion that Heaven and Hell can go hang so long as he gets Lilith's head on a platter. He's unsure whether or not he wants decoration on the plate.

The Darkness suggests pickled onions.

Sam questions that, not because he doubts that pickled onions go best with children's heads, but because his abiding memory of them is of a Christmas at Pastor Jim's and Dean eating a whole jar of them without being dared.

It's the kind of thing that they do on Japanese game shows but still Dean did it, and Sam's never been able to face them since he sat next to Dean throwing them up . Even the concept of them served with Carpaccio of Lilith disgusts him.

That he honestly considers Carpaccio of Lilith as a meal disgusts him.

Then his mouth waters at the thought. The meat thinly sliced and almost dissolving on his tongue counter pointed by the taste of the sweet, sharp, onions.

Whilst he daydreams, Dean has taken in the details of the case because, of course, Dean has to run to help the angels. Although he says that they're dicks, Dean has this serious case of hero worship. Any chance he gets Dean's on his knees for them , and then Sam thinks about it.

There is a third option here, he thinks, that serves him and not Heaven nor Hell. Dark Jess, invisible to the others, wraps her forearm over his throat and presses her weight and heat against him. "That's my boy," she says softly and kisses the back of his neck with her softlips.

***

The civilians think that Anna Milton is mad. Sam thinks the name is ironic but doesn't mention it to Dean. She's a pretty girl in the photos, over sculpted, pale as milk, with hair naturally the color of blood. She tells everyone what she can hear and has gotten herself committed for her trouble.

She's wearing a sweater that belongs on an old woman and on the surface looks fragile and haunted, but a closer look reveals that it's as if she was carved out of marble for there is no give in her. She doesn't look real and she moves with a strange coldness, one that is not like the angelic naiveté but more like a robot or an alien who is aping humanity . . . badly.

Anna looks at him as if she can weigh his soul with her dead eyes. He wonders if Dean wouldn't have been better to go to the hospital, he has the same deadness in his eyes now. But she recognized Dean's name, and she looked at him like he was Christ reborn.

Sam can't help but look down at her, sitting in the pool of sunshine in that old lady cardigan, just a scared little civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time and without the wit to just end it.

He doesn't press.

He doesn't need to.

He can smell the angels on her, a thick tang of old incense and obfuscating fog. "You could eat her," the darkness suggests, Sam ignores it. "You could break her." There is a brief image of this girl with her blood red hair prostrate in front of him with her dead dark eyes and the darkness coils over her like a mass of snakes and she likes it.

Sam waves it away as he smiles at her and tries not to think of what the Darkness is showing him; the sensations it is feeding into him, of keeping her as a slave, of the feel of her cunt slick around his cock, and the pulsing of her throat as she swallows, breasts pressed against his back as she does what he wants her to do.

And when she speaks, she reveals the secrets of the angels.

He could even share her with Dean.

He remains quiet because he knows he'll own her , and wonders if demon blood strengthens him and it is a corruption of angel blood, what Anna's blood would do ?

Anna doesn't notice what he's thinking and in some ways Sam is glad. Perhaps if she did notice she'd step out of this war, where even champions are cruel and covetous. He thinks of Dean and adds the coda, broken – the champions of this war are broken.

Anna turns out to have slightly more wit than most of the victims he deals with. But not by much.

Hiding in a church is one of those things seems like a good idea, but at the same time this isn't the kind of church that has power.

He can taste the faith here, weak and watered down.

The altar isn't even consecrated. The Darkness laughs in his head, because so much of the old magic is gone, lost to reason, and all the things that might have bound it are long gone.

There are churches that demons couldn't enter, but this one might as well be a house or a strip mall. When the statue of the Virgin begins to weep blood Ruby sounds like she's going to give birth to kittens.

Sam doesn't care, he can take it, he can take them all.

***

Sam learns more about Dean through the demon's taunting than in the months since he's returned from Hell.

The demon, Alistair, is sneering, nasal and cruel. So when the darkness suggests an alternative , a third option to letting the demons have her, or letting the angels have her, of using the angels, who want the girl dead as she is a liability, and the demons who just want her, and letting them fight it out, he's happy to send Ruby off to be tortured.

Dean is raw, looking like a kicked puppy, and when the girl speaks to him Sam considers it inevitable that he falls into sex with her. Dean's been covering his flaws with sex for years.

That in itself doesn't bother Sam, because there have always been girls, they don't mean anything, even with Jeremy and Perry whooping and laughing and telling tales, and little Daisy Rae jumping at doors complaining that she can't see.

Sam can't see either, and that's fine.

But when Castiel sees Dean there is something in the air between them. It feels like ice or fire or electricity.

It has power.

The demons notice it so it must be clear. Castiel looks wounded and Dean wavers between aggressive and scared. Anna misses it all.

And then Dean – who wants to run, to vanish into another country to get away from this mess, from that demon— runs into the fray armed with nothing but a tire iron. He does it all to save Castiel.

Sam's not sure who is more surprised: the demon, the angel or Dean himself.

But he saves the day and the girl by tricking that super-dick angel and gives Anna, who of course is an angel, because that's just the way their life works. If their lives were novels, they'd be cheap sensationalist trash. Even if Ruby is holding in her intestines and Dean is going to spend the next few weeks moping over his lost angel love who exploded into a ray of light, the Darkness thinks the whole thing is hilarious and that's the only thing Sam still feels .

***

Dark Jess is showing her amusement with the oily fabric of her dress, her tanned and golden skin, and the soft press of her lips. She's feeling indulgent but Sam's mind is on other things, even as she bites at his nipples and skims her hot hands over his stomach.

Dean is sitting in the car in the motel carpark.

He has his hands on the wheel but he clearly doesn't intend to go anywhere. He doesn't even have the radio on. He's just sitting there, belted in.

Sam is lying there on the cheao motel bed as Dark Jess shows how grateful she is for all the blood he took from Ruby, licking up the wound in her belly, but his mind is with his brother, even as she dislocates her jaw to swallow his cock down to the hips.

Dean told him about Hell and Sam couldn't help but think of the foggy town with its monsters and it's lingering nursery rhymes and the mysterious man in the dark coat. He thinks Dean might be over exaggerating because the sign said it all, "Welcome to Hell," and it makes sense to Sam that Hell would be suburbia.

It's not Hell Dean's fussing over, it's the angel. But as Sam's hips rock up into Jess' mouth, hot and slick and strong, he wonders what is going on between Dean and Castiel. Something passed between them, and the last thing Sam knew was that the two of them were fighting.

Dean is keeping secrets, Sam thinks as Jess pulls back, sucking his balls into her mouth. An orgasm hits him with the sensation.

Dean's secret is obvious; it's not what he did in Hell, because Sam's sure that he made that up.

Dean is fucking Castiel.

Or at least, he was. The two of them can't seem to be together long enough to do anything but argue as Dean's fight reflex kicks in and the angel doesn't know what Dean needs to hear.

Sam lets Jess finger his ass as Sam grins to himself, Sam knows what Dean needs to hear. Sam knows what to say. He wants Dean to be who he was, what he was, and to belong entirely to him. The angels aren't allowed his brother, Dean has always been Sam's, and if he's going to spread for a man he might as well spread for the most important person in his life.

"Mmmhmm," Jess says from between his legs, "you want him," she says clearly, "you need him." She kisses the inside of his thigh, licking up semen and sweat with a pointed little tongue. "Take him ."

And Sam decides that maybe he will.


	6. In which Sam find he doesn't have to convince his brother that the angels are not to be trusted

Every time that Sam convinces himself that the Darklings are a manifestation of some inner psychosis they happily prove him wrong.

They are sprawled over the carpet as Jess reads to them. It would be easy to mistake them for children with the way that they are dressed, even Marilyn is wearing a light sundress instead of his usual lycra number. Sam is reading the Lord of the Rings and he's stuck on this one odd section that keeps popping up all around him.

Asked to describe Hell the Darklings look abashed and scratch their bald heads under their baseball caps before reciting by rote, "Three rings for elven kings under the sky, seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone, nine for mortal men, doomed to die, and one for the Dark Lord upon his dark throne."

A few days earlier Dean, drunk off his face, sprawled in a chair with a bottle of Jose dangling from his hand looks at him and says , "Hell's fucked up, man. Everything you need to know in one stupid fucking kid's rhyme, 'three rings for elven kings under the sky, seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone, nine for mortal men, doomed to die, and one for the Dark Lord upon his dark throne.'"

Sam recognises the line even if Dean doesn't, and there is a second verse to it. It is the rhyme about the one ring in the Lord of the Rings. So, he's reading the book, finding it just as boring and wordy as he did when he was twelve, trying to find out why that rhyme is the one that they all use to describe Hell.

He supposes he could ask Dean but he's really not in the mood for the blubbering.

Dean wears a ring on his thumb, engraved with Hebrew symbols but no one remembers what they are or where it's from. Then Sam has this image of Lucifer as a great tower with a burning eye and he chuckles into his hand. That image is quickly followed by the image of Gollum sitting at a laptop going through the collection of "One rings" on e-bay.

His laugh is a little hysterical, so he bookmarks the page with a piece of toilet roll and throws the book behind him on the bed, before sprawling out. He has his feet on the floor and nothing makes sense.

Jessica looks up from the book she is reading them, "Is everything alright, baby?"

"Just fucking dandy," he answers and wonders where Dean is, and how to make sense of all this, and whether or not the apocalypse hangs on him rereading a book he didn't like the first time around.

There is a stain on the motel ceiling that looks suspiciously like a spider and he's only just noticed it. It could be a spider, he thinks, and wonders if the Darklings might forgo story hour long enough to investigate. Then he laughs again.

"Boss," Marilyn asks, getting up. His sun dress, Sam thinks, is really quite pretty. "Are you okay?"

"Fan-fucking-tastic." Sam's answer is only slightly sarcastic, and wondering how bad it is that his army of goblins, and the most bizarre of them who is currently wearing a bubblegum pink wig and a sundress, is asking after him.

"Want us to, you know, kill something for you?" Nigel, who is for reasons best left undiscovered is dressed like a bumblebee with hobnail boots on, asks.

"Is it too late to kill Tolkien?" Sam asks thinking of the book he's not even close to a quarter through reading.

That causes some discussion.

"Boss," Perry says, picking at the open cavity where his nose was, "Papa Tolkien is dead, but he left behind sons, would one of those do?" And Sam just laughs again, high pitched and wary, because even that doesn't help.

Seeing his reaction they start whispering again. Before Jeremy, dressed in a school uniform of all things, with shorts, answers, "we can take down Viggo Mortensen but Marilyn and Daisy Ray want Orlando Bloom so we're cool to kidnap him." And Sam just laughs again and this time he can't stop, even though he knows one of them is making cuckoo noises, and then that turns into Nigel doing his Jack Nicholson impression and Sam just laughs harder.

"I think we broke him," Daisy Ray comments climbing up to the bed to she sit beside Sam as he writhes in laughter. She sounds genuinely disturbed.

"No, baby," Jessica tells her as she picks her up, "he's not broken yet." Then she bends down and kisses Sam wetly on the ear. "We're just going to go out and get something to eat, back later, kay." And Sam can't stop laughing though he's pretty sure it's about to well over into tears, but Jessica, Daisy Ray and the Darklings are gone, leaving their book lying open, face down on the floor.

He slips into sleep before he thinks about it, the laughter exhausts him.

It's a different dream than the one he had of the small town.

It is a penthouse, white and classical in styling, but with a subtle twist that suggests that everything is wrong. The couches are upholstered in vinyl and not satins. The carpet is clearly fur, though of an animal so vast it probably never really existed.

Sam stands before a raised bed in which a woman lies. He wears only a pair of blood red leather pants, when normally in these dreams he is wearing what he fell asleep in, or his self-actualisation is enough that he is dressed normally.

He is barefoot but wearing a toe ring.

The woman rises from the bed as if emerging from the sea foam of her sheets.

Years of living with Dean means that Sam can appreciate beauty even if he finds it unattractive. This woman is almost repulsively' beautiful. Her hair is a spill of Pre-Raphaelite red curls, her mouth obscenely full, but as the sheet falls free she reveals a dress bound tightly about a lush nakedness . It makes her beauty austere and uninviting, but also richer. She has wide hips and heavy thighs, tall and statuesque with her tightly bound almost e rubber bodice and loosely knit white yarn dress. The rubber is tied around her neck in a halter but her arms are bare until the elbow where she wears many shining chingling bracelets.

Like Sam her feet are bare.

He can see her sex through the gown, and through the rubber of the bodice her erect nipples. "So," she has a voice like money, "you're the Boy King."

She moves close to him and her eyes are black and oily, but not like the normal eyes of demons. She smells like an angel, but no angel would dress like this. No angel would live in this place devoted to sex. Now that he looks around he sees that the flat top of the coffee table is supported by two women in leather, held together by chains and a two way dildo.

There is an Asian woman flopped in a chair in an antique kimono draped open, and her face is painted like a Pierrot with a green tear on her right cheek. The way she lolls, she is either dead or unconscious. Sam suspects that she is a second vessel in case she wears out the one she is wearing.

"You have me at an advantage," Sam drawls sitting down on one of the chairs, "I have no idea who you are."

She laughs, a thick dirty sound that clings to his skin and licks along his balls. "I am Belial of the Seven." She tells him as if it answers anything at all. "I was wondering if we were allies or enemies and then you come to my place uninvited."

"You summoned me."

Throwing her red curls back over her shoulder, she laughs again but her eyes are steel grey and hard as stone. There is no amusement.

"I could no more summon you than you me." She sits down beside him. She stinks of sex and fresh sweat. "Not equals perhaps, but not too different." She leans back, her breasts pushing against the rubber with every breath. "But you don't know who or what you are, do you, Sam-I-am?"

"I'm more interested in you." He knows his powers are strange things, dependant on Azazel's blood and Jessica's whimsy.

"I told you," She running black nails along the length of his chest in a proprietary motion, "I am Belial of the Seven. That is all that you will ever need to know. I am the Sybarite, the embodiment of pleasure and pain. I am the tempter of women that they might make wantons of their children and profane the High Mass."

"You're a demon."

"No more than you." Her answer comes with a lusty smile, white teeth and bee stung lips. "I am. I wondered if you would call, and if my shielding would hold you back."

"What are you?"

"What are you?" she counters with a smile leaning back to present her heavy breasts to better advantage. He doesn't have an answer for her. The strange man in the foggy town who spoke in riddles made more sense than this.

"I am Sam Winchester." He answers quickly, stiffly.

"You are the Boy King." She corrects. "You will destroy Lilith before she finishes her plan."

"I will have her head." Sam grates the words out, ignoring her hand as it fondles his knee.

"Maybe," she smiles. "Are you sure you don't want to," she gestures to the bed, "I seem to have broken the last one," he knows that there are several corpses, both male and female, in the bed, literally fucked to death. "I find it's a great way to seal a deal."

"Are we dealing with each other?"

"Truce," she admits, "your plans don't interfere with mine, and mine not with yours, so we'll just leave each other be, well apart from the occasional fuck, because well, this vessel is just delicious." She strings the words out of her lush mouth, making sure to punctuate it with licking her lips, her desire forcing its way out of her mouth.

"I don't think so."

"Your brother was not so delicate." She says standing up. Her back is entirely bare apart from a ribbon strung through rings piercing her skin. It drapes entirely to bare the cleft of her ass, but her dress is soft white lace wool and leaves nothing to the imagination.

"I never did want Dean's sloppy seconds." Sam snarls the words out.

Belial replies with a grin. "You make it sound like he was in control. He was mine, and through me, Alistair's. He was released at my whim, will you not thank me for that?"

"Jessica!" Sam barks out the word and she appears, coming in a liquid form from under the gold leafed chair that he's sat on, curling around Sam in a dress that is boned and delicate black lace.

"You called," She purrs, rubbing her ass against Sam's crotch.

"Take me back." And with the demon, Belial, watching Jessica kisses him, pushing her tongue down his throat, and he wakes up coiled around her, with Nigel using Sam's own cell phone to take photos of Jessica, half undressed, bare breasts, like a fashion photographer. And just like that, everything is back to what passes for normal in Sam's world.

 

When Sam tells his brother about the dream of the woman at breakfast the next morning, a thing he's not sure at first he should have done, at first Dean rages and then he stops, smiles to himself and starts to laugh. "You know what," he says, "I know how Bilquis felt now."

"She said she knew you." Sam continues, forking up his omelet in the diner.

"She did." Dean said, "but she's bad news, Sammy, bad-bad-bad news. I didn't think she left the basement." Sam had inferred that she was bad news entirely on his own so nothing Dean says can change that.

"What is she?" But Sam presses the point, he's not interested in the omelet in front of him despite that it is very good. It's perfectly seasoned, and moist. He just doesn't want it anymore.

"She is a Prince of Hell." Dean answers, he has a sausage suspended on his fork, which he bites into, continuing to talk as he chews. "She's one of the baddest fuckers in the Pit, if not the worst."

"And Reigert?"

Dean chokes on his sausage. He takes loud mouthfuls of his coffee to try and dislodge the meat. He catches his breath, "What did you do? Hold a fucking mixer for the Kings of Hell? is there anyone else we could do with hiding you from? Perhaps Ruby is the Satrap of Primordium or one of the other countries in Hell."

The waitress had looked over when Dean started choking but when she sees that they're okay she goes back to her seat at the counter and Sam's glad because it's not a conversation he wants to have her listening in on.

"They keep coming to me."

Dean rolls his eyes, but somehow Sam suspects it's not for his benefit. Then he launches into a tirade about curious fucking angels that can't leave well enough fucking alone and other choice phrases mostly made up of short Anglo Saxon verbs. The word that stands out most to Sam is not the one he expects, Angels.

"They're angels?" That surprises him.

"Sort of," Dean admits, broken out of his tirade, "they used to be, they've been downstairs a long time, Sammy. God alone knows what they are now, but they were angels. Some of the very best Cas said, the ones that fell originally and took control of Hell in Lucifer's absence. They're not just demons, not just angels, they're fucking Satans."

"But Lucifer is Satan." Sam finds the words slip out of him because he's not used to Dean explaining things, it's been a long time since he has.

"No, Lucifer is the big bad, the original Fallen. They're his Generals, his Princes, the original Dirty Dozen." Even Dean's lost his appetite, he's shifting his eggs around on the plate. "Bobby said Satan meant Defier, those who defy, it's a title, not a name. Cas said that there were seven of them: Abaddon, Asmodeus, Belial, Balberith, Orias, Astaroth and Moloch. Then there are the lesser Satans, and there is about thirty or so of them, then the Dukes who control their own lands."

Everything Dean is telling him rings false, because Sam knows Hell. Hell is that lonely little foggy town. He has a momentary image of the small town's post office server being a red-scaled leathery demon but he doesn't want to laugh, not here.

"Where did you learn all this?" It's an obvious question.

"I spent thirty years being disemboweled Sammy, gives you plenty of time to listen to office gossip." And with that he finishes his coffee and prepares to leave.

"Which one is Reigert, I mean, which name?"

Dean looks at him with something that might be pity, and might be scorn. "Fucked if I know. Tell you what, next time I see him, I'll ask, right before I skewer him."

"You can't." Sam tells him "Only an angel can kill another angel."

Dean's grin is vicious, scythe sharp, "That's something to put to the test, aint it?" it's a challenge then throwing money on the table for the waitress, including what appears to be a very healthy tip, he goes back to the car.


	7. In which the Darkness hungers

The Darkness is hungry.

It wakes Sam from a sleep that was deep enough to be dreamless. Dean is having a nightmare in the next bed and right now Sam could actually eat his brother to alleviate the terrible emptiness gnawing at his stomach.

It's a dilemma: part of him wants to phone out for pizza, the only thing this late at night that will deliver, yet another part wants to curl up in the bed next to Dean, and stroke that muscular expanse of neck and back until Dean sleeps peacefully again.

If he gets Pizza he'll wake up Dean when it arrives.

"I could get you food," Jessica murmurs, "we could go out to eat, and bring you something back and you could take the other hunger," she runs her fingers down his chest in the same proprietary motion that the demon used.

"No garbage," Sam tells her, "or stray dogs. And no drug runners, especially after the mess you made last time." Perry managed to sneeze cocaine out of his noseless face all over the carpet. It was a bad thing, and hell to explain to Dean who asked questions about shake-and-vac motel room service of all things.

They know his rules, garbage stinks up the room, stray dogs make them go odd and bring back fleas, but there is plenty of human filth that they can feed on that they prefer: rapists, murderers, and pedophiles . There will be a gang here in the city that will lose some members tonight. "Just don't forget the pizza."

"We know, Boss," one of them, he can't tell which in the gloom, says but he thinks it might be Mal, "And if we find a demon can we . . . "

"Knock yourselves out," Sam agrees as he goes to the bathroom for a piss. When he comes out they're gone and Dean is whimpering, legitimately whimpering, and then a propos of nothing he laughs – a dark disturbing and dirty sound that goes straight to Sam's crotch.

Sam crawls into bed beside his brother and softly kisses the side of his neck. He appreciates the taste of musk and sweat and cheap shower gel that lingers on his skin, the way that Dean fits so smoothly against where he is spooning him. "Shush," he murmurs into the soft ear that he wants to bite, "Shush," and Dean turns over, buries his face in the crook of Sam's neck and quiets.

Sam just breathes him in as if he were vapor, the smells of him, his body heat and the lingering scent of cordite in his hair, smoke, and something else. Something alien and new, something church like. Sam has known Dean all of his life, Dean has been his constant, even when he was with Jessica in Palo Alto, so this new smell sickens him. It is not his Dean that he's smelling it's Castiel, that angel.

Angel's can't be trusted. They are holy fools, and it takes to little corruption to turn them into creatures like Reigert, like Azazel, like Belial. He wonders what kind of push it will take to make Castiel, sacred and divine idiot that he is, dupe, dick and Dean's, fall. Yet this angel, this sacred watchman is dicking his brother, has claimed this tight ass – his hands are on Dean's hips now, clutching tighter— has forced his brave strong brother to his knees and made him like it.

Suddenly hard Sam catches his breath as Dean makes that whimpering noise in his sleep again, grinding his perfect ass down against him and then turns over again, flopping down face first on the side of the bed.

Sam rolls over unto his back before he jerks himself off at the thought of Dean's mouth, Dean's ass and Dean's hands, lying there on the bed next to him. He knows he should feel wrong, WRONG at this, at the slow slip slide of his hand as he pictures Dean's there instead. He imagines that he can feel Dean's silver ring and wonders why he's never asked Jessica to do this for him, to be Dean.

She has suggested it before.

He's arching his hips up into his hand because the bed smells of Dean, of want and security and that strange burning church smell that lingers on the pillow. The other hand he wets quickly in the water glass beside the bed and starts to finger his ass, dipping two fingers inside to the first bend, just enough to torment. He wants them to be Dean's fingers, long strong and knowing. He's not touching himself enough just yet, letting the scent of it, the smells of his brother, take him as he muffles grunts and groans into the pillow.

He's so close that he can almost taste him, smoky - rich - Dean. He separates the fingers in his ass and the sudden sharp pain is enough to bring him off. He comes in thick, sticky streams across his chest and the sheet, and there are splashes of it against Dean's ass and back.

Sam thinks he should wipe it off but instead he just towels himself mostly clean with the sheet and climbs back into his own bed to wait on his pizza.

***

"Four in the bed and the little one said, Roll over, roll over." Jeremy is sitting in the back of the Impala singing at the top of his little lungs, wildly out of tune, just because he can, the other darklings are ignoring him, "so they all rolled over and one fell out, banged his head and began to shout," and they all join in for the refrain, "please remember to tie a knot in your pajamas."

Sam groans, it's either groan or sing along, and Dean is one of those moods – dark and violent to the point where he doesn't even turn on the tape deck, especially as he put in British Steel by Judas Priest and the cassette deck ate it and spat it back out with streams of brown tape. That had pissed Dean off more than normal because it was one of his favorites, although one of those that Sam liked least, and he's got no idea what's wrong with the player and won't until he gets it out to have a look at it. For all he knows it could eat the rest of his tapes. Sam is treading lightly.

And there are at least six goblins in the back of the car that Dean can't see singing, loudly and off-key, just for Sam's ears "Please remember to tie a knot in your pajamas. Single beds are only made for One," and then they count in the round.

Sam's given up on the Lord of the Rings for the day and is reading a Latin work on the heirarchies of hell, or at least would be if Dean wasn't seething and the darklings weren't singing. Part of him thinks they should sing Disney songs.

The only Disney film he can think of that might suit them is the Black Cauldron which him and Dean had seen as kids and it had freaked them out, but he can't remember if there was music to it or not.

"Three in the bed," Jeremy continues and Sam thinks about banging his head on the dashboard. Instead he shoots them a dirty glare and Jeremy grins at him, all sharp and white piranha teeth before he just gets louder. He knows he's getting away with it because Dean is in the car, growling at passing drivers. He wonders if he has given them too long a leash and if it needs to be yanked back in.

***

The boarding house is recommended by Dad's journal, they are rarely in this part of the Midwest and it's listed as cheap, clean and friendly. It's one of about three listed in the journal total. There is a picture wedged in between the pages of the diary of John, laid up with his ankle, and both Dean and Sam stuck under each arm, Sammy just old enough to walk and Dean missing a front tooth. There is a house behind them with apple trees. It's a rare photo of the three of them together, a Polaroid complete with coffee ring.

Neither of them remember the photo being taken but it's getting towards late evening, Dean is still seething over the tape deck eating one of his favorite albums, and they're less than a half hour from the house, so Sam suggests it.

Motels don't care what time you check in, but boarding houses are different and Sam just hopes that they can still get in.

The owner of the boarding house is tall, thin and white, if such an adjective can be applied to a person. He has a kindly face and when he sees them, he grins with thin white lips. His hair isn't grey but white. "Why if it isn't Dean and Sam Winchester, I haven't seen you boys since you were knee high, but I'd know that car anywhere." He looks like a scarecrow.

"Do we know you?" Dean asks, hands in his pockets, his entire stance is defensive. A black cat with an eye patch, a peg leg, and a white blazon on its chest makes itself known. It purrs loudly. It's the strangest cat Sam's ever seen. Dean tries to shoo it away with hisfoot.

"Probably not," the man agrees, "but I know you. It's been nearly thirty years." He writes down their names in his book, "Why you Sammy, when I knew saw you last, you were a wriggling, squalling, poop machine. But look at the way you've grown, someone ate all his peanut butter."

Dean grins at his brother. "And look at you, not bad for such a goofy looking kid. You grew up strong as well, although the way you ate you'd be either hugely fat or a great hunter. Is your dad here?"

Dean's entire expression goes from amused to closed-off quickly. "He died."

The man wipes under his nose with the side of his hand, "That's a shame, he was a good man. Well, I will get you boys a room, and some supper," Dean reaches for his wallet, "oh God no, you're money's no good here. Is there anything you two need?" He pauses for a moment, "and ignores the cat," as mutters as he moves to the door he where he has to push the cat out of the way with his foot. "He spits." Both of them move out of the way when the cat yowls out a strange noise, which sounds like the word "Unicorn."

 

Dinner is a hodgepodge of boiled vegetables and meat pie, which Dean looks at suspiciously before covering it in gravy. There are potato dumplings to the side. Sam's wary of the boiled cabbage but the cat has plopped itself down on the table cloth, batting a brussel sprout between its front paw and its peg leg.

It is a certainly evil looking cat.

The boarding house owner introduces himself as Peregrine Arbuthnot Jones III, or Arbie, and for all that he talks, he reveals very little of anything, other than it's beef in the pie and they are having bread and butter pudding for dessert.

The food is homemade, even to the pie crust, and the plates are worn and well washed. There is fresh lemonade in tang jars, but it just makes the place feel homey. Arbie has even made the gravy himself. Despite the fact that the food is very good, he only has the vegetables himself. There is hollandaise sauce in a jar but no one has touched it.

"I knew you boys when you were tiny, you spent six or seven weeks here." Arbie says then takes a mouthful of the lemonade, "your dad snapped his ankle in a fox hole, I was volunteering at the hospital, and I had the room, so the three of you came to stay with me. Although I was convinced you were a girl, Dean, for at least a week, wouldn't talk, hair down to your shoulders." He grins, "And Sammy, you had reached that age where all you did was talk but it was all nonsense."

"That hasn't changed," Dean agrees, "but I get regular haircuts now. This is really good." He forks up the pie and chews it thoughtfully, "but pie has never really let me down before."

The cat stretches and yowls and Sam can't get over it, it really sounds like it's saying unicorn.

 

"What's the cat called?" Dean asks the old man as they're sitting on the veranda and Sam is upstairs in the bedroom listening to the entire conversation through the darklings. Specifically Nigel, who has bat ears and looks like an evil Yoda. Because of the weather Nigel is wearing the heavy, ugly sweater that Dean gave Sam, and it dwarfs him, dragging on the floor, and hanging long past his claws.

"Balberith," Arbie replies, and takes a long drag from his cigarette. Sam can hear the crackle. "It's one of those things."

"Ah," Dean says as if it explains things perfectly though it means nothing to Sam. "One of those movies we're not part of."

"You've been talking to Wayne." The tone is accusative. "You meet his boss yet?"

"Dee?" Dean asks, "I met her," there is a smile in his voice as he talks. "She drinks a lot of coffee."

"That's her," Arbie agrees. "Pretty though."

"Not as hot as Hathor, in that scary rip off your head spit down your neck kinda hot way."

Arbie laughs. "Does your brother know them?"

Dean goes quiet for a moment. "I needed a time out. Travelled a bit. Met some folk," there is a jangling noise, "did some thinking."

"You know what I am?" Arbie sounds intent.

"The way your cat has been going on I'd have to be an idiot, you might have to do something about that." Dean sounds intent, like he might actually deal with the cat in the hunter fashion.

"B and I get along just fine," Arbie admits, "long exposure, I'm used to his quirks, and him to mine, most people just think he's an odd cat."

"Instead of the truth?"

"People see what they want to see, Dean, you know that better than most, how many folk see a huge shaggy dog instead of a werewolf, or a pale interesting person instead of a vampire."

"I know." Dean says and it's sad. "And Dee is just a pretty girl who drinks too much coffee."

Arbie laughs, "She is at that."

Sam walks away from Nigel, letting him suck on the sleeves of his sweater, because Dean has his secrets and this one doesn't seem to matter. When Dean meets girls, pretty girls, he just fucks them and Sam doesn't need to hear the details of that. He'll learn that for himself.

He ignores the jealousy he feels that Dean is more comfortable talking to a stranger than he is with his own brother, because it doesn't matter. Dean will be his entirely. It's just a matter of enjoying the temptation, of letting it build until it's too much. He'll kill Lilith and then Dean will be his.


	8. In which Sam realizes that cats are not necessarily the best counselors.

Coffee is an odd affair made with a strange device of bowls and bubbling water that looks more like a science experiment than a beverage. Thankfully, Arbie serves it up in cups almost as big as buckets. It is strong and ashy with a lingering taste of something else, something waxy, cherries maybe, Sam thinks. There are black cherries in the pancakes, which are thick and as light as clouds. The syrup is not maple, but it is sweet and pleasant.

 

Dean is devouring them like he's never seen food and Arbie seems content to just keep piling his plate up high. There was freshly made granola still warm from the oven. The bread is homemade, not shop bought, but the spread's "I can't believe it's not butter" which almost completely ruins the image.

The cat is sitting on the edge of the table, licking his one paw, and then running it up over the eye patch. It's missing most of its teeth, and the one Darkling that decided it would be good eating got bitten, and damn near lost a hand. They have decided pretty much en masse that the cat is off the menu because of that experience.

The rabbits in the nearby field are another matter though. Sam doesn't think people will complain too much about that.

Sam is feeling full just from watching Dean as he shovels food into his mouth. First, two bowls of the granola, drizzled thick with honey, then four plates of pancakes before he sits back with a lusty sigh to drink his coffee, as sweet as he can stand, which is odd because Dean has always preferred his coffee black and without sweetener at all.

Sam's not sure if it's one of the changes from Hell, that perhaps Dean had always stomached black coffee because their Dad had with his Marine habits, Sam's great rebellion was preferring lattes whether he had started to actually like them or not. Perhaps after his years in the town Sam knows to be Hell he simply learned that he preferred his coffee sweet. Or it's one of those things he has learned from those months away, one of those changes that Sam doesn't want to think about his brother having made.

Dean is his, damn him – bitter coffee, too much pie and rare beef - that's what Dean will taste of when Sam kisses him. He will taste of the hunt, of Middle America, of gasoline and cheap truck stop diners.

This new Dean will taste sweet. Sam doesn't like that. He smells of smoke, instead of the wind across the Arizona plains.

Hell has changed Dean and Sam does not like it.

Sam was always the most important thing in Dean's life, but it looks like he is finally learning to think of himself. Sam considers whining but there are other gifts in Sam's arsenal. When Dean sleeps, he could slip a darkling down his throat, to consume the sugar for him. It would always be dark inside Dean's stomach so that would not be a problem.

"Dude," he snarks, "carry on eating all that sugar and not only will we have to peel you off the ceiling we'll need to get you bigger jeans, maybe with a stretchy waistband."

"Oh, it's not that bad," Arbie says, pouring them more coffee. "Last time you were here the only thing Dean and I agreed on was food, he's a growing boy, let him eat as much as he likes."

"He's thirty, and that metabolism of his won't hold out forever."

Dean grins through the pancakes he's half chewed. "Got a sweet tooth, Sammy, aint nothing. Always had a sweet tooth."

"It's a thing," Arbie says, drinking his own coffee, "after the accident his body craves sugar, it'll pass. It's only been a few months."

"You told him about the bus crash?" Sam accuses, because Dean sure as hell didn't tell him about it, told Bobby who'd kept it to himself, until he came back and Bobby dropped the ball and he told this strange white man, but tell his own brother, now why would he do that.

"Oh," Dean rolls his eyes, "there it is, bitchface number three."

Sam pulls a face because that's Dean's answer to most things, it's a great avoidance tactic, accuse Sam of being menstrual. "And it's old friend bitchface number one, go on Sammy, tell me why your hormones are up in arms this time?"

Sam just slams his coffee down on the table and pushes his chair back. "Okay, if that's all you're going to do," he says and goes to walk away, "you've changed, you know that."

"Change is good, Sammy," Dean says pulling over Sam's plate of food. "Might want to try it once in a while, might start with a haircut."

Sam walks away.

The cat finds him when he's sitting on the fence and debating whether he should drive into the local town and pick up a packet of cigarettes. He doesn't smoke often but sometimes he wants something to do with his hands, to suck in the fumes and hold them in his lungs until it prickles and then slowly release it through his nose. Everyone has the odd cigarette, now and again, and it suddenly appeals.

He's pissed and he knows it, Dean is playing the clown so that everyone likes him, it's not who he is, it's not even close, and Sam hates it. Dean is using Sam as a foil to show how much he likes Arbie, a thing he normally does for girls.

"I was hoping you'd popped out for a quick smoke," the cat says sitting on the ground before him, staring up at him with it's one evil eye. "I'd kill for a drag."

Sam laughs, "I considered it, but I don't have any." It doesn't surprise him that the cat can talk, or even that it sounds somewhat like James Mason with that old television gravitas, nothing much surprises him anymore, even the idea of a smoking talking cat.

"Send your minions," the cat says jumping up to perch beside him on the fence, "what's the point of having them if they can't pick things up for you."

Sam is pretty sure that this is his imagination, that this is something that the Darkness has manifested for him- a version of the three legged cat who can talk. "I've got beer, will that do?"

"Nah," the cat says and then licks it's paw, "terrible, filthy habit but I just don't want to quit."

Sam nods, "I'm more of an occasional smoker myself."

"Oh like I can manage twenty a day," the cat remarks snidely, "I miss it, yanno, the bulge of it at the back of your throat, that almost cough, and how truly vile the first drag of the day tastes, but how good the second one is."

"Big smoker? I mean before you became a cat." Sam is playing it cool, the world has gone mad so why not have a conversation with a cat, it's not like it's real anyway.

"I loved to smoke," his purring sounds like a playing card caught in the spokes of a wheel, "nothing better in the world than lying naked in bed on a hot day, scratching and smoking."

"This is where you ask me to break the spell right?"

"Couldn't if you tried, monkey," the cat tells him, its voice is brusque. It slightly rolls it's r's.

Part of Sam is expecting himself to freak out, but considering the horrors he has manifested through the Darkness this is nothing, just a talking cat. He's seen worse on children's television, and it has a point about the scratching - on a hot sultry day nothing truly feels as good as a self indulgent scratch. "So what were you, I mean before you were a cat?" He's expecting to hear some story of how a witch cursed him, how it's all very Sabrina the Teenage Witch and it'll be over and done with soon enough.

"Same thing I am now, Sammy-boy, a prince of Hell, one of the seven."

Sam pauses a moment, the cat doesn't look demonic. It's freaky, yes, with its peg leg and eye patch but not necessarily demonic. "So what happened to the leg?"

"Got run over," the cat says ruefully, "fucking pick up truck came out of nowhere." Then he gives the most wicked feline grin, one that promises a hell all of it's own, "but can't complain, got this now." He waves his peg leg about, and then puts it back on the fence to maintain his position. "Great for poking folks I don't like in the balls. And you get away with things as a cat that you don't as a person."

"Like what?"

"No one ever shouts at you, and when you do something they just go 'Damn cat' and deal with it," his laugh is raw and vicious, "if I could just get a smoke once in a while it would be the perfect life." Sam has never heard a cat sigh before, let alone a happy sigh, "lying in the sun all day, torturing folks just because I can and getting away with everything because you're just the damn cat."

"Does Arbie know you can talk?"

The smile this time shows sharp white predator teeth, "Course," he says, "part of the deal, he guards me and I guard him."

"So then he's a . . ." Sam leaves it open hoping that the cat will fill him in. If Arbie is a supernatural creature, it's entirely bypassed him.

"Yep," the cat replies. "Now are you coming with me to the mirror or not?"

 

The cat calls it the Mirror of Ardeth Bey, but Sam has been around enough to realise that he's been played. It's a star shaped mirror from the sixties on a stand. It looks about as ancient and magical as an Elvis bobble head. It's standing in the hay loft amongst many old abandoned pieces of furniture that are covered in old dust sheets and cat hairs.

Sam takes down the mirror and looks into it. Part of him expects the whole Harry Potter thing where the mirror shows his desires, but instead he only sees himself. "Reality is fluid," the cat says, getting himself comfortable on an old granny crochet blanket. "You see what you want to see, and the mirror will show you that, if you know how to look."

"It looks like the only thing it can show me is the Jungle Room in Memphis."

The cat's laugh is dark and dirty. "Then that's what it'll show you. Just look at it, Sam, and it will give you answers, and unlike most of us, it doesn't ask questions first."

So, Sam decides to believe the cat and he stares into the mirror. He sees Jessica behind him, adjusting her hair over her shoulders. Her blond hair is bled through with black and she has Daisy Ray in her arms. She smiles and winks at him as Daisy Ray licks her painted lips.

"Show me," he murmurs to himself, "show me what I want to know."

The mirror does not go misty or dark, it's suddenly different and he sees Dean, but it is not Dean, not quite. It's a sort-of-almost-Dean, not as tall, not as handsome, with eyes set in deep shadows. He is kneeling beside a throne made of the bones of some great monster, and upon it sits a woman with sparkling gold eyes. Sam recognises her, though she is wearing a different body, as the woman from the penthouse, the demon Belial. She is stroking Dean's head like he was her pet as she explains to someone about currency and price hitching.

Dean's eyes are cast down, staring at his bare thighs where he kneels, not looking up, not because he can't but because he doesn't want to. Sam knows that. "Dean," the woman says, "go to the rack, she's waiting." Dean unfolds himself but his eyes remain dead and dark, and he says nothing. "Today Alistair will be overseeing your education."

He nods, and it's a slow, deliberate gesture of defeat.

Sam closes his eyes, he doesn't want to see this. "That's not Hell," he tells the cat.

The cat opens it's one eye and looks up at him. "Hell's what you want it to be, kid, what do you see Hell as?"

"It's a town, there's fog and a lake, and a thing that lurks in the dark."

The cat's laugh is raucous. "Oh that's rich," he says, "of course, Sam," he enunciates the name, "oh, that's the best joke I've heard all day."

"Is it hell?" Sam asks.

"Yes." The cat answers through a feline smile, "and it's not, but you'll learn, people always do, Hell is what you want it to be, and that Hell, well, you could say it was made just for you." And then the cat closes its eye intent on ignoring him, purring to itself on its nest of blankets.

Sam turns back to the mirror but the only thing it wants to show him is his own reflection.


	9. In which Hell presents it's angel

The air of the small town nestled beside the lake is stifling and close. Sam wakes up in a ruined hotel room and knows instantly that he is there because of the smell of old aluminium and algae. He is fully clothed and lying on top of the damp blankets. There is a mannequin in the room, at the end of the bed, wearing a pair of his boxer shorts and a vest top that says "49% pussycat 51% bitch." Wedged into the waistband of the boxers is a flash light.

The mannequin is dressed like Jessica before the fire.

The room that he's in looks like the one that they shared in Stanford but with a layer of dirt and decay that seems to be an essential par of this town. There are places where the carpet is sticky and a dark stain of mould is making a home in one corner. Yet on the dresser there are the broken glass remnants of Jessica's perfume bottles.

There is slime-rotten fruit in a bowl in the kitchen and the two of the cupboard doors hang off their hinges.

Splattered across the wall in some dark and foul liquid, buzzing about with flies, is a written message

in my restless dreams i see that town,  
you promised you'd take me there again someday  
but you never did  
well i'm alone there now  
in our special place  
waiting for you.

The message has hearts on the I's and none of the letters are capitalised. It is different from the last time it appeared.

Sam knows this is a game. He just doesn't know all the rules yet.

Although it is an apartment building and not a motel, the corridors could be interchangeable. They are painted mould grey and there are covered round lights tracking along the ceiling. The black dots of desiccated flies spatter the lampshades, and greasy black fingerprints smear all along the picture rails. On the side of one door is a scrawled Devil's seal, and Sam doesn't know what it was drawn with. He doesn't really care either.

There is a pool of old blood across the top of the stairs, sticky and thick, buzzing with flies. It drips heavily onto the first stair but Sam just steps through it and continues down towards the street.

The door creaks and opens out into the dark and falling snow. There are a few light flurries around the sputtering street lamps, but the fog has cleared. The grass is frozen and crunches underfoot but its not cold at all. The darklings emerge from the darkness, wearing winter clothes is Marilyn with his wig slipping about on his head starts a verse of "We're all off to sunny Spain" before one of the others slaps him hard enough on the back that his wig falls off.

Sam's glad, he's not in the mood for their musical interludes.

He's so distracted by their antics he doesn't see the black dog that leaps through the window to the house behind him and knocks him flying.

 

Sam can tell from the harsh light and the white cupboards that he just woke up in a hospital. He's sprawled over the edges of a hospital cot, his feet practically on the floor and a blanket is draped over his hips. He's completely dressed but his shoes are next to the cabinet.

A blonde nurse in a red sweater sits against the door, blocking his exit. She's pretty in a bland kind of blonde way. She has her arms around her knees and she is clearly not going to move. When she sees he's awake she speaks. "You can't go out there, it's not safe." Her tone is explicit. "Dr Kaufmann said we had to wait. It's not safe out there."

Sam's seen girls in her state before, she's one step away from tears, from hysteria, but the only things holding her together is the light, the fact that she is not alone, and that she has her arms around her knees. For a second Sam wonders what Dean would do, Sam smiles to himself as he stands up, Dean would fuck her.

"I'm Sam," he says.

Her eyes are rimmed with thinned mascara when she looks at him, but her hair and uniform are clean. Apart from the mascara she is perfectly made up. She is someone's fantasy of a good nurse, but she's not Sam's. Sam knows better, not in this place. Her absolute terror is reason enough that he is still in the town of fog.

"Lisa," she snuffles. "You can't go out, Sam," she wipes angrily at her nose, "the angel is out there. Dr Kaufmann said he would be back, we have to wait for him."

"It's okay, Lisa," Sam tries to comfort her, but his heart's not really in it, "I'm here to help with the monsters."

When Sam used that word before Reigert had looked at him strangely, Lisa tilts her head with the same question. "Monsters?" she asks. "I have to help Alessa, I have to get to her, but..."

"Hello, Sam," a little girl cuts Lisa off as she steps out of the anteroom, Sam had noticed it, and through it that the door was nailed shut. He recognizes the little girl because she has been in this place before, singing about oranges and lemons. She is wearing a black school uniform with white shirt and the badge reads "Midwich Elementary" proudly. "Want to play a game with me? Lisa's no fun and I want to play."

Sam goes to say something but she cuts him off. "Lie down," she says and for some reason he does, he doesn't even know why other than that this little girl seems to have some sort of power here. "If you can guess my name I'll take you to Alessa."

Lisa goes grey, then stands up and moves to the other room, clearly taking herself out of the game.

"That's it, Sam, you just have to guess my name." She has her arms behind her back and is rocking on her feet and she almost looks innocent, in a Wednesday Addams kind of way.

"Do you like green eggs and ham?" the girl asks him, then she laughs. "I always wanted to ask a Sam that, I bet you don't, I bet you don't like them, I bet you don't like green eggs and ham?" She laughs as if it's the very best joke ever. Then she climbs up onto the counter. "Sam, can you guess my name."

"Rumplestiltskin," Sam answers.

She jumps down with a patent leather slap against the tiles. "No, silly," she says, "That's not my name."

"Lisa?" He asks. It's the nurse's name and the first thing that pops into his head.

"No, I'm not Lisa."

"And you're not Alessa."

"No, I'm not Alessa."

From under the cot the girl lifts a pillow, toying with it as if was a plush animal, gathering it in her arms. "Are you Jessica?"

"I'm not Jessica, she's waiting for you. You're not really trying are you? I have a special name."

"Mary?" He asks, giving her his mother's name.

She rocks for a moment and tugs on the pillow. "I'm not Mary," she says, "but Mary was here," Sam balks at that information. "She was sick, she was really sick but it's okay, because James made her well again, like this." She moving fast enough that Sam doesn't really expect it when she presses the pillow down over his face and bears down, and no matter how much he struggles he can't pry her off because she's too small to grab.

 

Sam wakes up in the motel room when Dean places an ice cold can of Mountain Dew to the back of his neck. He jumps and knows that the little girl's name is Laura, but not how he knows it. The darklings are about his feet, under the table he's sitting at, chattering away to themselves.

"You were miles away dude," Dean tells him. "Interesting fantasy? Angelina Jolie? Brad Pitt? Together?"

"Nurses," Sam tells him, knowing it's the truth, of a sort. "Nurses."

He thinks of Lisa sitting there, rocking back and forth with her terror and whispering, "The angel is out there," That is why she's scared, an angel. If only he could get Dean to meet her, but that would mean finding out where the town is, but he has more information now. The hospital is called Alchemilla and the school is Midwich Elementary. It shouldn't be long now before he finds something.

Dean is wrong, that town was Hell, and he can't imagine a fate worse than eternity in Pottery Barn. Breughel is wrong, Hell is not "a garden of unearthly delights." Sartre was wrong, "Hell is not other people. "Hell is an eternity of banality in a lakeside town.

"Earth to Sam," Dean breaks off the thought before it finishes, "I got a line on a hunt, three men in Bedford, Iowa, beat their wives to death after visiting a strip club." He sprawls down in one of the wooden chairs opposite, and Jessica is behind him in her dress of creeping darkness, "think about it Sammy, finally a mission with strippers."

"Looks like one of us gets our wishes to come true," Sam drawls as Jessica's hands linger over Dean's hair, almost close enough to scratch his scalp. Sam knows how good her hands feel over his own scalp. Jess is teasing him. She is showing Sam how Dean could be his, how Dean could be theirs. "And one day you'll think with your big brain."

Dean pulls a face, one that he'd refer to as "Bitchface number five" if he could see it, but at the same time he admits the blow. "So Iowa, that's somewhere in middle America."

"That's Omaha idiot," Sam continues, knowing that Dean wouldn't tolerate that kind of comment about his taste in music, but it shows that at least Dean was listening to it on the rare occasions that his own rule, driver chooses tunes, means Sam controls the radio. Sam, however, doesn't get to drive nearly enough, he knows every beat and guitar chord for all of Dean's tapes, but Dean can't even get the title of the song right.

"Distracted by strippers, Sammy, distracted by strippers." And Dean gloats, flashes his million gigawatt smile and Sam wants to be annoyed with him, but instead he's just attracted.

 

***

When the dust of a truly disastrous hunt settles, saved only by Dean's need for other people and thus calling Bobby, the rift between them is wider than ever. But what Sam keeps to himself, what he keeps deep inside, is that the Siren appeared to him differently than it did to Dean. Dean describes a man to Bobby, with blue eyes and an abiding love for Led Zepplin.

Sam saw a girl, and she looked like Dean but with an Agent Scully vibe. The only reason he didn't make a pass at her was that she did look so much like Dean and there was no point in aiming for the facsimile when Dean slept on the couch, crashed out drunk, and Sam could breathe him in and that wonderful new smell of burning churches, of cheeseburgers, bacon, coffee and cordite.

The Siren smelled of hyacinths.

"You know what," Sam says as Dean scratches irritably at the place where Bobby stabbed him. "The Siren, she got all her names from Disney movies."

Dean thinks about it for a moment and normally he laughs, "Typical," he grates out, "finally the chance to fuck a Disney princess and who do I get, Nick the man?"

Sam bites off his response, instead he reacts with the usual barbs, the ones that they've traded since they were children, the ones that have long since lost their severity. "Is there something I should know?" He waggles his eyebrows lasciviously.

Dean's eyes narrow for a minute, then his lips tighten. "Do you know what, Sammy, I'm gonna go for a walk."

"Your angel hovering nearby?" Sam can't quite keep the vitriol out of his voice.

"I haven't seen him in weeks," Dean answers calmly. "I just thought you and your succubitic whore might need some alone time."

"Dean," Sam starts but Dean is pulling on his coat and doesn't listen.

 

Dean comes back near dawn, and as they are driving from Bedford, Dean with his jaw set and Sam with his head against the passenger side window, sees a plume of black smoke suggesting somewhere in the town there is a fire.


	10. In which there are a lot of Deaths

The rift between Dean and Sam has grown since Iowa, even though Sam knows they're both denying it to themselves and to each other. Dean sits in the impala for hours talking to someone on his cell and Sam listens to Jessica read to the Darklings.

The hunt was a cluster fuck.

It's not even suggestible that there is something that can be redeemed out of it. First, there is Alistair, a demon who literally makes Dean's blood run cold and he makes Sam feel powerless, scoffing at Jessica and her minions. He literally tears poor Barry in two, not that it affects him much. He lies there in the graveyard hollering, "My legs, my legs, has anyone seen my legs?" as if it was a contact lens he had lost.

Then they went Spirit walking, which wavers between being cool and making Sam feel impotent because, it cuts him off from the Darkness within him and he feels almost human, where Dean, on the other hand, takes to it like a duck to water. And there are times, when Dean is in the corner of his eye, that his brother seems to almost glow. It's a pale glow, like it's tamped down under a blanket, but it reassures what Sam has always known - that Dean is spectacular.

Then Dean receives a call on his cell and takes off like a bat out of Hell, leaving Sam at the hospital with Pam's body trying and to explain that they were mugged and it doesn't matter that another soldier fell fighting the good fight.

Pam looked impressive in life. In death, she looks like meat and Sam kinda wants to take a bite.

Then when he stands in the hospital parking lot, catching a crafty cigarette from a visitor because it's just been that kind of day, he has his Ipod on blasting out Iieee because he needs the drum beat and shriek of it and Tori can scream for him, when Dean pulls up in the Impala.

He climbs out, takes a plush toy from the passenger seat and a Walmart bag from the back, then without a by your leave, or even looking around for his brother, Dean goes into the hospital, so Sam stubs out what remains of the cigarette under his shoe and follows him.

The light in the hospital is austere and sterile, blanketing out Jessica's abilities, and when the blonde nurse walks past him in her red knit cardigan he immediately thinks of Lisa back in the foggy town. In his ear Tori Amos sings "She's your cocaine, your exodus laughing," and it's too true to really hurt.

The Darkness is silent but hungry, and the bag of blood hanging from the IV pole would be so easy to just take, but he doesn't.

Dean goes into a private room wherein which a kid is sitting upright in the bed, with a clear drip. There is a black haired woman sat on the bed beside him with a book. When she sees Dean she grins at him, and Dean just grins right back. She looks at the door, "Are you coming in, Sam?" she asks.

Sam has the decency to look abashed as he tugs his earbuds free to let them tinnily continue to sing at his chest.

Sam has never seen a woman like her before in his life, she has this presence, which is amazing, like being surrounded by electricity, but she's wearing black leggings, camel-toed shoes and a tee that says "Death - this country's number one killer."

"Told you I didn't need to invite him," Dean says reaching over to the boy and handing him both the plush zebra and the bag, "that he'd follow me." The look he gives Sam is mocking with a hint of a smile that suggests chagrin. "Sam, Ben. Ben, Sam," he gestures to the boy, "and that's Dee." Dee grins and closes the book she was reading to the boy. "Dee knows everyone."

"That's a bit of an over exaggeration, Dean," Dee smiles and ruffles Ben's hair, "it's not like everyone knows me."

Ben can't be more than nine and he has the floppy limbed zebra in his arms and is hugging it for all he's worth. "Hey, Sam," Dean says, "wanna take Dee for a coffee whilest Ben and I talk?"

It's not a hint, it's an order. So Sam shrugs his fists into his pockets and walks with her. She's tiny, standing not even chest height against him, but there is something about her, something that makes her seem massive. "Your brother's a good man," Dee says, "you can trust him, even if he's not sure about you."

"What do you know about it?" Sam asks since because obviously everyone knows more about it than he does because he's always the last to know.

"Me?" she asks with that blinding grin, "not much, I don't get involved, Sam, I watch the doors, Ben's a sweetheart and Dean is good for him. You know he tried to kill himself."

"Dean?" that surprises Sam, suicide is a one-way trip downstairs. Dean knows that.

"No, Ben," she counters, going to the machine and punching in the coins for the coffee. "Dean's the only one that remembers he's a kid," the cup falls into the tray and the coffee that comes out is steaming and thick. She hands it to Sam before she pushes the button again. "First time I saw your brother the universe was having a crap on him and he expected me to do the same."

The paper cup in Sam's hands is starting to burn so he lifts one of the cardboard holders. It doesn't affect her as she takes out the second cup and then pushes the button again. It seems everyone is getting a drink whether they want one or not.

"You might want to cut him some slack," she says, "the universe well and truly took a shit on him."

"And what about me?" Sam asks.

"What about you? Seems to me you've got it all sorted." The last button she pushes is for hot chocolate. "You know where you stand, the very firmament of Hell serves you, you can feel and feed it's hunger, you are not what you were, and your brother is something else as you race headlong into the destiny you have decided for yourself. I like your brother, he's a good man. Righteous." She takes the last cup herself, "but I don't take sides, never have, never will, but you're being a dick."

She grins up at him and it's a wickedly innocent smile, all black lips and too much eye makeup, and she still strikes him as being magnificent, huge, though she's a tiny little thing. Small enough, he thinks to fit into the palm of his hand. "Wanna be the boy king? BE the boy king, it doesn't matter, it all ends, sooner or later, but don't be a dick to the one person who'd forgive you anything. Not everyone gets that." Her face is hard all of a sudden, like a perfect porcelain mask, "now smile, that little boy needs us to be happy."

"What were you reading him?" Sam asks, he think this woman wouldn't be reading Where the Wild Things Are.

"Pride, Prejudice and Zombies," she replies with more of that flashing grin, the one that's whip quick and dazzling, "it's tough finding books he hasn't read yet."

Dean is sat on the edge of the hospital bed spreading out felt tip markers that he clearly got at Walmart, along with packets of Oreos, bottled fruit juices, a large bag of marshmallow twists, and a colouring book.

The child is wrapped around the new zebra, "It's just," he sighs and Dee puts her hand out to stop Sam going into the room because for this the two of them need a moment. "It's Miley Cyrus." Then he has the good sense to look abashed by it. "I'm not going to grow up and marry her." He said, "just like I didn't with Debbie Gibson, or Karen Carpenter or even Nancy Sinatra." He hugs the zebra a little tighter. "I'm just tired, Dean." He continues, "I'm just so very, very tired."

Dean sighs, "First of all, Miley Cyrus, dude, remind me to block your subscription to the Disney Channel, now Harry is hot."

"Dirty Harry Harry?" The kid asks,. "Ooh she'd eat you alive."

"You know why I like you, kiddo, you always know who I mean."

"That's coz we speak the same language," the child states calmly, "AC/DC rules. What about Dani Filth?"

"The dress confused me for a while, but I'm pretty sure that's a guy." Dean grins at him, "You're right though, very pretty."

The child points out sadly. "I'm never going to be old enough to see my favourite bands." The child points out sadly.

"Me neither," Dean admits, "they all split up before I was born."

The child laughs and it's a genuine sound. "They're sending me to Europe, some books fell on me and they think I was being beaten by Mrs Doyle, so the state is trying to take me away, again. The Bishop is up in arms because I got blood all over some manuscripts and, Monkey is," he sighs, "Monkey is training his grandson to replace him, and I'll get another Monkey, same as I always do."

"Dude," Dean protests, "Where in Europe? Think of it, kick ass soccer, and you can go to that, and those festivals don't have age limits if you go with a grown up. I could go with, it would be sweet, course you'll have to forgo the pie. I'm told Europe just doesn't get pie."

"I didn't know who else to call," the child looks like he might break. "No one else really understands."

"Ahem," Dee says stepping in, "I brought coffee and the Antichrist light here." She offers one of the cups, the hot chocolate, to the kid. "Ben, you and he have something in common, you know Dean killed Azazael." Ben, the kid, nods sagely, "well Dean did it for Sam."

"You're the _little_ brother?" Ben asks, "To hear Dean talk, you'd be the same age as me," and his laugh is dark and dirty. "Dean," he turns across to where Dean is colouring with a blue marker, "can you get me some sugar for the chocolate please?"

"Kiddo," Dean says capping the pen, "if you just want to threaten him without me in the room, just say so, I'm pretty sure he could take you in a fight."

"Take me where?" Ben asks impishly, "I'm pretty sure he could snap me in two, he's what happens when you eat your crusts."

Dean laughs, "Dee," he says offering her his hand, "you going to get me up to date with all of the gossip in Chicago?, Believe it or not Lamia doesn't talk much in her calls. She's always too busy screaming at Zsu Zsu and throwing things."

Dee laughs as she loops her arm through Dean's, and it's the happiest Sam has seen his brother in months. "Cas?" Dean asks in answer to something she said that Sam missed, "haven't seen him in months," then he stops, "no, I tell a lie, I saw him a few days ago, for about two minutes, before he pinged off again, that's the problem with these supernatural types, no staying power." And Dee laughs as they leave the room.

"Are you going to tell him," the kid asks, "about the Corruption?"

"I don't see what it has to do with you." Sam answers stiffly, "let me guess you're the fourth Prince of Hell." It's only slightly sarcastic.

The kid laughs, "I'm not from Hell," he says, "I am the gate to the Pryxis Prima, Azazel did that to me. I slit my wrists and drank drain cleaner and all I got to show for it was bad breath and interfering social workers." He buries his face for a moment into the tangled fur of the zebra he hasn't once let down since Dean gave it to him it.

"I was a mistake, I know that." The kid's voice is measured and quiet. "Azazel thought he found the key to unlocking Lucifer, but he was wrong, and I am all that remains to show for it." He takes a deep breath, looking at Sam over the zebra's head. "What he nearly unleashed is much much worse than Lucifer could ever be."

"And this '"Corruption'" is part of it?" Sam uses the kid's word.

"No," the kid answers, "it's the mirror image. Did you summon it or did it find you?" He's not judging, instead if Sam had to press he'd say the boy was scared.

"It found me, I tried to hunt it."

"It's dangerous, you'll have figured that out by now. It is Corruption in it's purest form, a piece of genuine Entropy, and it has it's own agenda though I doubt we could ever understand it."

"It doesn't want to let Lucifer loose, everyone else seems to." At that moment Sam is tired, everything suddenly weighs on him like he's Atlas holding the world between his shoulders.

"I doubt it'd care." The child sounds so old, but looks so small in his Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas, curled around a plush toy like a lifeline. "The apocalypse isn't necessarily what we think it is, Sam, we're both clever enough to figure that out. Lucifer is the Prince of Lies, but are those lies he told or lies told about him?"

"You've been thinking about this." Sam files the information away.

"I've had time." The kid reassures him. "I have nothing but time. Just," he licks his lips, "Just, know what you're getting into. They're taking me away," the kid says, "somewhere I might be happier, with yet more books, yay," he says that sarcastically, "so they'll take my books. If you want something from them, about it," he's guarding his words now, sure that Dean must be back in hearing range, "ask Dean, but do it quick."

He stopped taking a deep breath. "Do you know what the word apocalypse actually means, Sam?" His eyes are old, ancient even, and he makes Sam feel very small. "We don't know what these words mean, we think we do but we don't know the half of it. Did you know that enthusiasm means 'filled with God.' But apocalypse, we're not even close to knowing what it really means."

The kid looks up at the door, "Dean," he says excitedly, "I was just telling Sam about my books, you said he'd like them."

"Like them?" Dean asks from the door, "he'd cream his pants." And Sam knows that Dean is exaggerating because there are no books that good.

*****

 

Dean wasn't right, Sam didn't cream his pants, not quite.

The house which appears to be a large country house is literally full to bursting with of copies of ancient manuscripts, photocopied and bound. It's like someone's crammed a university library complete and the Vatican's secret archive into this one house in suburbia.

The man who opens the door appears to be at least a thousand years old, and Chinese. There is a younger Chinese man beside him, and they look like something out of a kung fu film. "You must be Dean," the old man says with a broad Bronx accent, "Ben said you were coming."

"And you must be Monkey." Dean says pumping the old man's hand. "You were on holiday when I was here last." He pushes past him. "Ben says we can have a rummage as long as we're sneaky."

"Grandfather," the younger chinese man says. "It is a racist slur that he calls you Monkey." It's obviously a bone of contention between them us.

"No," the old man corrects, "he calls us Monkey because we're descended from Wu Cheng'en. Now, stop worrying about racist slights and put the coffee on. We have work to do."

 

Later when Sam looks up from the book in his lap, one that actually deals with the "Corruption" as Ben called it, he finds Dean staring at him.

It's not a look he recognises, but he thinks it might be a cross between disgust, shame, fear and loathing. Yet, it is all tinged with love and Sam knows his brother well enough to realize that Dean will blame himself for what comes after, because Dean blames himself for the lack of oxygen in space and Sam just isn't in the mood.

Rather than overhead lights there are reading lamps all over and the pervading gloom allows the darklings to play tag through the towers of books. Sam is, for the first time in a long time, content.

So the last thing he expects when they get back to the motel with a bag full of books that Monkey assured them they could just take is that the angels would be waiting for them.


	11. In which the shit hits the fan, and Dean catches it.

When the angels take Dean, Sam is at a loss. He doesn't know what to do or where to go, so he goes back to the hospital. The black haired lady, Dee, is gone, and in her place is a middle-aged nun looking tired as she wrings her hands and repeats the rosary again and again.

The kid still isn't sleeping. He's sitting under a reading lamp, colouring and the bandages on his wrists sparkle like frosted Christmas paper. The nun looks terrified for a second and then she gathers up her knitting, which is in a bag at her feet, and her rosary and leaves the room, bowing her head to the kid.

"Dean said he was coming back," the kid says bluntly, "I wasn't expecting you."

"The angels took him," Sam tells him.

"And what do you want me to do about it, scare them with my catheter bag?" He rolls his eyes, "I know, I can bombard them with my collection of Hot Wheels that Dean bought me." He mutters something dark and foreign under his breath.

"But," Sam begins.

"But what? I'm a librarian, I read books, it was something to keep me occupied that got out of hand." He caps his marker and lifts another colour. "I know it's a shitter that the angels have taken your brother but they won't hurt him, they have plans for him and I'm sure this is a blip. They'll bring him back when they're done, and they'll probably launder him too. For all we know they've got him in some swanky green room eating cheeseburgers and reading prophecies."

"They don't. They captured Alistair and want Dean to torture information out of him." Sam is trying to make this belligerent and rude child understand, but it isn't happening.

"And? It's the irony that interests the angels, you know, the master being worked over by the pupil. They won't hurt him."

"You don't understand," Sam said, "He can't do it, he's a mess."

"Maybe the problem is, Sam, that you don't understand, or," the kid narrows his eyes appraisingly at him, "it's out of your control and they're not letting you help."

Sam is angry and it bubbles up out of him, whether he wants it to or not. "Who are you to judge me? You claim to like Dean and won't lift a finger to help him."

Ben looks at his colouring and licks his lips, "Sam, you're mistaking can't for won't. I can't help. Not because I don't want to or I have a policy of non interference, but because one: I'm stuck in this hospital bed for the near future, and two: I didn't get any strange super powers, I just don't die." He takes a deep breath but it's ragged.

"What about Dee?" Sam interrupts, "Can she help?"

"She could, but she won't and you don't want to owe her a favour." Ben is adamant about that, and the colour is draining from his face.

"They have him and they are going to break what little of him remains, if you could have seen him before – before they all started to play with him and . . ."

"I think I see that more often than you do, Sam," Ben cuts him off, "do you know why he pays attention to me, despite, lets face it, that no one likes me. I have minions, not friends, and Dee, to who I am a curiosity. But Dean sees me and do you know why? Because I remind him of you. A you that he doesn't have to protect from hunting, a you he can give everything to just like he wanted, a you that will never grow up and start channelling imps and God knows what else in your mad drive for power. You scare him and you can't even see that. So, he phones me and he sends me movies he thinks I'll like, and books he liked when he was a kid, and he talks to me."

The tears streaming down the kid's face are pink tinged and there is a bloody froth to his lips. "He's the only friend I have and even then I'm just your proxy, so don't you talk to me about him like that. The one that doesn't know him is you."

The kid wipes the bloody saliva from his lips with the back of his hand and takes a mouthful of water. "I'm not supposed to get agitated." He's panting. "You said you'd met some Princes of Hell, ask them to help. You're the boy-king, they'd love for you to owe them a favour. Now, I'm . . ." he swallows, his breath coming in quick pants, "going to call the nurse and they're probably going to," he doubles over coughing, splattering blood all over his colouring book, "now look what you've done, it took me all. . ."

"Nurse!" Sam screams going into the corridor as the boy begins to fit, "Nurse!"

They bustle him out of the way and start using medical terminology that Sam doesn't understand as they hold the kid down and he looks so very small. He was right though, Sam needs to summon the forces of Hell to find the way to his brother -- someone he won't have to owe a favour to, someone already beholden.

When he reaches the parking lot he summons Barry, whose legs are held on with duct tape and Jeremy who peers at him from under a knit beret, other than which he's completely naked. "Keep an eye on the kid for me, make sure nothing happens."

Barry, holding up his trousers, and probably his legs with it, salutes with one hand. "Sure thing, Boss. So, we're not to eat him then."

"No," Sam shakes his head as he roots around in his pockets for his cell phone, "and don't eat the plushy either, let him see you, no one else though. I suppose I owe him something."

\----

Ruby narrowly escapes having her head cavedin with a pipe when Sam tells her what's wrong and she laughs. The main reason she escapes her fate is that he doesn't have a pipe to hand, and she might actually be able to help.

Her spell is flashy and only really narrows his search down to a location and by the time that they get there everything's done but the dying, and Alistair is more than willing to oblige with that. Castiel spirits Dean away to the hospital, like they haven't been there enough lately, and Sam is left to follow in the Impala. He thinks darkly that this is it, this is his destiny, always following behind.

When Sam finally arrives, Castiel is sitting beside Dean in the hospital bed and they're talking, too low and quiet for him to hear. Yet, when Castiel sees Sam he looks up and his expression seems regretful, but it's hard to tell because the angel has the facial range of a GI Joe doll. When he looks at Dean, though, he really looks at him. He stares at him like Dean is the saviour of the universe.

It sickens Sam.

Not because he thinks the idea of two men is preposterous or even that sleeping with the supernatural is gross, because it would make him a true hypocrite, but because Dean is his, goddammit. His to protect, to save, to worship.

Sam would have gotten him out of Hell, he just needed more time.

Now, Castiel is practically Dean's new favourite person, practically glued to his hip, and he's found himself a proxy brother in that strange kid in Cheyenne and Sam . . . well, Sam has Jessica.

He wants it all to go away, to vanish into the darkness and the corruption described in Ben's books, to just go to Pam's funeral and feel genuine remorse for getting her killed instead of what he does feel which is the waste of a valuable resource and . . .

He looks at Castiel, holding his brother's hand and looking as lost as he can with his limited facial expressions, and walks back into the corridor without caring if Dean knows that he is there or not. It doesn't matter, Dean's replaced him anyway.

\----

 

For the first time visiting the town without warning isn't much of an upheaval.

He walks into the hotel room and the lights go off and then flicker back on again, that's all the warning he gets before he finds himself in the town. The room is different; there is a desk with an old typewriter instead of a laptop with flat-bed scanner. There is a rudimentary kitchen, and a beaten up sofa. There are three doors leading off the room, one of which is nailed shut and written across it in black spray paint are the words: "DON'T OPEN THE DOOR"

Through one of the open doors is a small badly kept bedroom, the sheets are dirty with use, and there is a bookcase in one corner. The bedside clock is broken.

Through the other door is a bathroom and over the bath is a hole large enough for Sam to crawl through. This place has rules, and Sam's not one to back down from a challenge. So, he climbs into the bath and through the hole.

The walls on the other side are sticky with some sort of cold residue, like a black slime. Then, to his horror, the wall seethes as if a hand is trying to break through. For the first time in this place, in this town he knows to be Hell, he begins to feel afraid. The floor beneath him is a metal gantry, but there is no way to see how high it is suspended and the walls are, now he stops to listen, breathing. He knows that this is the town he dreams of, but it is completely different compared to the times he'd been here before.

He can hear things, strange unnatural things, and the Darklings haven't manifested although the light is more than weak enough for them to do so. Sam gives into the fear within him, the opening through which he came has gone under the slime and muck that coats the walls and breathes, he runs.

As Sam runs, he realises that the walls are pulsating and the lumps are reaching for him as he listens to the wheezing of its breath. He just runs until he bumps into another person. Or at least he thinks it's a person until he sees it and the face is just a polished dome of fetid skin.

It reaches for him with it's hands, or what passes as them, and he doesn't think – he just attacks. If he doesn't it will kill him, he knows that, and like the walls it's skin is seething, roiling around on it's face as he smashes it against the metal floor. He's shouting and screaming and the walls are breathing and that's when the Darkness erupts from him in a twisted ball that sucks up everything in its reach and Sam's too busy smashing the creature's head against the floor to notice.

When he sits back, panting, his throat raw, he starts to understand what everyone else told him, that the town is Hell and he had only seen the very least of it. He also knows, as the black slime starts to leak from the ceiling down the newly scoured walls, that it's not going to stop and he has to get out.

Dean spent forty years in this, Sam thinks picking himself up, he can survive long enough to find a way out, he always has before.

 

He takes a knife from a shambling creature in a hood by smashing it across the shoulders with a large rock. It's not much of a weapon, he knows, but it's better than nothing and this place is almost literally crawling with things. He doesn't know what they are, only that no two are the same, and that the slime that covered the walls and reached for him was the most harmless thing here.

They lurch out of the blarkness and Sam glad that he's tall and fit so that he can run. He just wishes that there was somewhere he could stop.

"Saaaaaammmm!" A voice calls, and God help him it sounds like Dean but he knows that it's not, because Dean is in a hospital bed with his angel. "Don't run Sammy." He really wants to go towards that voice because Dean will save him. In this place he feels useless, his own terror is augmented by that of the Darkness, and the very place itself reeks of absolute fear and burning and the strange sickly sweet smell of incense.

He was right that this town is Hell, he was just wrong about how bad that it was. Hell is not an eternity in Pottery Barn, it's this, running scared with no real idea of what it is that he is so scared of, only that if it catches him, it will never stop.

"Saaaaaammmmmmyyyyyy!" Dean's voice calls in the darkness in an obscene singsong. "I don't like it when you run from me, I can't help you if you run from me."

Sam ducks into an alleyway, and then through an open window into a destroyed kitchen. It looks like the galley of a sunken ship, all rust and corruption and things toppled.

"Oh," the Dean voice calls, "Hide and Seek, how delicious." Sam doesn't stop, but with the eerie otherness of this place the voice carries, "We're going to get you," the Dean voice sings, "we're going to get you." Sam lets out a dark, abrasive laugh. "You'll be dead by dawn, dead by dawn, dead by dawn." He laughs harder because he's quoting and it's so very Dean that it hurts, "I'll swallow your soul, I'll swallow your soul." And Dean laughs and laughs and laughs.

He doesn't stick around to let Dean find him though, he ducks through the side door and over the fence to the hospital.

Maybe Lisa knows the way out he thinks as he runs away from the Dean voice, ducking out of the way of the creatures that look like nurses. He shambles along on numb feet, with his terror tasting like aluminium in his mouth and his throat tight and sore from running.

When he arrives at the hospital there is a bald headed man in a nice suit. "Ah, there you are, Sam," the man says and he glimmers, he literally shines, "you led us a merry chase looking for you. This isn't really the kind of place you want to linger," he grabs Sam by the arm but for all the violence of the motion it's not an attack, "come on, I'll take you back to your brother. If Valtiel hadn't seen you I dread to think what might have happened."

"What the fuck are you?" Sam asks trying to wrench his arm away.

"I'm Zachariah," the man answers with a smile, "an angel of the Lord, Castiel's superior, and although you aren't at all necessary to our plans. . . Dean is quite fond of you and I can't imagine he'll play ball if you get yourself stuck here."

Dean has told him and told him, that the angels don't actually give a shit about him, but Sam's been in this place for what feels like hours. He hurts and he just wants to leave, even if he's not sure how. The angel just grabs his arm again and then the light comes, bright and white and hurting.


	12. In which Sam is forced to accept that he is extraneous to Heaven’s plans but that Hell has a personal interest in him.

When Sam decided that the only place that Jessica would transport him was his Pottery Barn hell of suburbia he was wrong. Whilst it was true that the town had a truly dark side in many ways it was an improvement on the place he found himself in with no memory of Jessica, and convinced he was mad from the shadows that flitted about his vision.

Hell is worse than that strange little town with it's Hellish netherworld. Hell is working in a call centre answering the same questions over and over again when a recording would easily suffice.

He lives in a small apartment with a bed he has to lie diagonally across to fit in, with Jess as his sometimes there sometimes not girlfriend. In fact if not for the sex he'd go mad.

It lasts months.

Months of driving a piece of shit jeep that is determined to fall apart at a misplaced look.

Months of living off packet ramen and pasta bakes with packaged salads for lunch and instant coffee.

Months of polo shirts and "have you tried switching it on and off" before the angels reveal that that this was a test for Dean and Sam was an unfortunate casualty.

Months of a hell so bland it wasn't worth killing himself over, although most of his work mates did, and all to show Dean that he was born a hunter.

Dean is distant, but he tells Bobby that he had wanted to quit.

Since the Siren Dean doesn't talk to Sam much.

Since the Siren Sam doesn't really want to blame him.

No, Sam knows, he's wrong, since Dean came back from Hell he doesn't talk much to anyone but Castiel.

Jessica is a better conversationalist anyway.

Ben's books are explicit about his "infection". They call it the "Corruption" or the "Demon curse". It only refers to it in abstracts but one thing that all the books agree on, it is invariably fatal. It drives the victim mad and then body hops to someone more suited and carries on the infection.

It reads like he's contracted the T-Virus.

It doesn't mention the woman sat on his bed playing with the remote control or the horde of imps having an impromptu battle royale on the rug over a mouse one of them found in a dumpster, unaware that when they gave it to Daisy Ray to hold she ate it anyway.

It doesn't mention the town.

It does mention that the infection hungers and that only the blood will appease it. It suggests that the more powerful the supplier of blood the better it will appease his hunger.

It also mentions that according to legend a god was once infected. It called him Seth.

Sam has never met a real god, just a few minor supernatural creatures pretending to be gods, so he has no answer when he mentions calmly to Dean that perhaps Seth might have some answers in their plan to defeat Lucifer but it's a pity because he was a god and his priesthood has been dead for thousands of years and Dean says that they might just phone him.

He's pretty sure that Dean is winding him up when he dials and maintains a conversation with someone called Horace, but he does tell Sam it's sorted. That they can talk later, that Seth doesn't like the phone.

Dean's sense of humour has twisted since he returned from Hell.

Sam knows that too.

Other than that, because apparently Dean gets the god's voice mail the second time and has to leave a message - Dean won't let a good joke slide given the opportunity, it's business as usual.

Usual being that anything goes in the _Great Winchester book of Wierdness_, but that there is a series of books about them written by a hack in the midwest, and that apparently girls are writing epic stories of love between him and Dean, obviously deserves it's own chapter.

Once he gets past what the girls refer to as "the squick factor" of other people seeing his brother like that, mixed with a healthy dose of jealousy and loathing, he starts to wonder what else is in the books, which Dean seems determined to read.

The books might hold Dean's secrets.

The books might hold his.

There is something icredibly intimate and secret about incest, he thinks, and the image of himself drinking Ruby's blood from Dean's mouth appeals. He has to rearrange himself in his pants just thinking about it.

The image changes, to Dean pouring Castiel's blood into his own mouth, of Dean impaled upon Sam's erection, rocking back and forth as Sam drinks the angel's blood from his mouth, smearing it around his brother's lips as Jess sits behind, holding him, watching, murmuring, feeding as he feeds, fucking as he fucks.

At the moment Dean is stuffing his face with chili cheese fries so the image, no matter how pleasant is hard to maintain. Watching Dean eat is either an erotic experience or a scene from a horror movie. It's more pleasant watching the Darklings feed and that's like the dinner scene from the Dark Crystal.

Watching Dean eat is the real reason Sam tries to eat healthy, because half of what Dean puts in his person is enough to put people off food for life, never mind the way he eats it.

The Dark within him can spawn tentacles which can force their way down a man's throat and swallow his heart down from the inside.

And it's not nearly as disgusting as watching Dean eat a yoghurt.

He has seen the Darklings suck down intestines like they were spaghetti, with the meat flipping back to slap them bloodily in the face.

And it's not nearly as disgusting as watching Dean eat enchiladas.

He eats with the same passion he gives to hunting and for a while Sam entertains the concept of being the centre of that focus, that passion, that need. He imagines it's like being burned alive.

Castiel's implacable gaze is uncomfortable. It sinks over Sam and weighs him down with it's blank perfection. But Sam can almost smell the fire that burns within the angel, and knows it is a candle next to Dean's forest fire.

Castiel smoulders and Dean blazes.

Dean's hands are calloused from handling guns. His skin is coarse and dry. His palms are like sandpaper and would brush roughly against Sam's own skin. Would Castiel's be softer? warmer? colder? he wonders. He imagines Dean touching Castiel, sandpaper palms on suede, and licks his lips.

And Dean would do this for Sam, he'd fuck the angel for Sam to watch, whilst Castiel was blindfolded, a morsel in this feast, not to partake but to be taken, and Dean's green eyes flashing at Sam over his shoulder as he sucks angry red marks on Castiel's white skin.

Sam would be on his throne, emperor of all he surveyed, with Jess on her knees before him, mouth open as Sam thrust inside raggedly, his hands in her hair but focussed on what Dean was doing, what Dean was doing for him.

Jess stands up, a sinuous inky black line of darkening hair and slinky dress and smiles, sliding unto the bed behind him with an unearthyl sinuous grace "you shouldn't just imagine," she chides him as she bites at his ear lobe with her sharp-sharp white teeth, "if you want, then need it, and if you need it, take it."

Sam doesn't turn, she hovers over his shoulder, she almost always does. "What are you?" he asks, thinking of the descriptions in the book of the Corruption, and there is no doubt that that is what she is.

Jess smiles and kisses his neck softly as she wraps her arms about his chest, "I'm whatever you want me to be." She answers, and then her voice is Dean, "I'm whoever you need me to be." The arms around him are stronger, muscular, bare, "I'm here for you to take. To feed, to cherish, to make us both stronger, richer, deeper."

When she kisses him, forcing her tongue into his mouth Sam doesn't really care anymore that she never answered the question.

 

Seth comes to Sam in a dream, which gives him two equal and opposite reactions. One that he is freaked out that he is talking to a god in a dream. The other the steady reassurance of it being much more logical to talk to a god in a dream than say on a cell phone.

Seth appears in a comfortable sitting room with over stuffed couches and a few tasteful pieces of Egyptian art, including a lovely watercolour of women at dawn carrying water. It's not what Sam expects at all.

Seth is, afterall, the god of chaos and disorder, and he lives in a rather nice air conditioned house that is kept immaculately tidy apart from a glomerular knot of wires that form an umbilicus from a large screen tv to a game system. It is currently flashing on standby.

Instead of a sand coloured carpet, as one might expect of a desert god, there is a nice dark red and brown Spanish tile and a low table with a french press of coffee and several fruit tarts.

"You must be Sam," the god says and Sam is frankly disappointed.

Seth looks mostly meditteranean with dark dark eyes but a shaved head. He looks like a businessman with a perfect tan and shining pate. His grin is all teeth and there is a red stripe on his tie, and his socks, visible where his pant leg has ridden up from crossed legs, are red too. His shoes, however, like the suit, appear handmade.

"Hathor said you were taller." He puts a strange inflection on the name, something Sam quite recognise but his accent is pure deep south. It's a sexy black molasses drawl. "She wasn't taken with your or your brother, but Hathor don't like new folk none. I, on the other hand, darlin, I could gobble you up."

"Is she your wife?" Sam asks.

"Hathor?" Seth responds with a laugh, "I like my balls where they are, thank you." He looks at the game station, "I asked Horace to step out, to give us some time alone to talk. Dean told him you had questions about what you were reading, about the _qeqou_"__

It's funny because although Sam doesn't know the word, he doesn't even know what language it's from, he knows what it means. It is the word Seth uses for the Darkness within him. He can see it now that he looks at the edges of Seth's eyes, in the corners of his mouth, the folds of his ears.

Seth appraises him, "how does it manifest for you?" Sam asks.

Seth replies with a question. "Do you know what it is?" Sam takes a deep breath but says nothing. "I didn't think so, well, darlin, it seems it likes you, maybe you're a keeper. I can tell you what I know, and him downstairs," he looks at his feet, "he can tell you other things, and those upstairs," he flicks his eyes to the ceiling, "will tell you something else entire."

"I was told it was pure entropy." Sam admits, and leans forward to pour himself a cup of the coffee, which is stronger than he likes, so he adds sugar.

"That's a fair description," Seth agrees, "but it's," he takes the cup Sam offers him, "it's. It's the other side of the coin," it's clear Sam doesn't understand that either.

"It aint easy to explain." He says taking a deep breath of his coffee, holding it in his lungs and closing his eyes. "Like trying to explain an elephant to a blind man, ever hear the story of that, the three blind men and the elephant." Sam nods, he can imagine how the story goes though he's never heard it. "We're the three blind men, darlin, and it's the elephant. You, me, and him downstairs."

"Lucifer?" Sam asks.

"If that's what you want to call him. Every coin has two sides and an edge. Some of us live on the edge with the people above, the normals, and the people below, the hell spawn. Those that live on the edge straddle both worlds, right. But the meat of those worlds are seperated." He empties his cup in a single swallow and then fills it again.

"We're receptacles, darlin, like cups to hold the coffee, and not everyone can hold it."

Sam thinks of the man he went to hunt, screaming - make it stop make it stop - with half of his brain hanging out of his skull. "And what's the coffee?"

"Anti-creation, the inevitable death of all things, the corruption, it is as much part of life as energy, it is the absence of it given will, form, by the receptacle. How does it manifest for you?"

"An old girlfriend," Sam answers, "she died."

"Sometimes," Seth said, "it's a great black dog that lies at my feet, and sometimes it's a woman that lies in my bed with skin like black marble and the mouth on her, darlin, it would curl that pretty hair of yours." He looks distant. "Sometimes it's a shadow that curls around me like smoke."

"Demons are human souls who were corrupted through exposure, darlin, they are the smallest part of what we are. Horace said you were the boy-king, it must be why it likes you, all that power, that potential, demon blood?" The question is just tacked on.

Sam nods. "God's blood is better, you could find a willing donor if you asked around, but any supernatural entity will do. To feed it human would need a genocide, and god knows it's created those before in it's hunger."

"Why?"

"Because that's what it is, darlin," Seth answers calmly, "it is hunger and chaos and a hundred other things, it's the great Dark, the fear that lurks under the bed and against the windows at night. It's the shapeless horror you hear when you're walking late at night. It aint anything but hunger and need and want."

"And Lucifer?"

"As I hear, and remember this is only hearsay, the angels lied, him upstairs sent Lucifer to check out his neighbour and he came back infected, this darkness all over and through him, so him upstairs threw him out, turfed him over the edge of the coin and into the dark where it was strongest. I heard all sorts of legends about it, Horace said that he was holding back the flood of it, but Horace aint too reliable. He flew a little too much."

"So release Lucifer and it will follow."

"In a torrent."

Sam protested. "It doesn't want him freed."

"No, darlin," Seth corrected, "it just don't care. Now you be eating those tarts, don't want Horace coming back and getting hopped up on sugar, he's bad enough normal like." He rolls his eyes but it's fond. "Boy wanders off if you give him too much sugar and half the time you can't trust him to tie his laces right."

Then the look Seth gives him is cold and assessing, "she's always gonna be the girl you never should'a smiled at," he says, "but there's a wickedness there, if you're willing to plumb it, chaos aint all bad, it aint never lonely, darlin, and it never ends."


	13. In which you'd think that a prophet of the lord would see that coming

Of all the insults Sam has undergone in his life, there is something truly spectacular in having a prophet of the lord explaining the architecture of Hell using a mobile constructed from paper plates, string and a bendy straw. Perhaps the final straw in his bad temper, the one that sees the darkness lashing about like a caged octopus at the table under his feet is the mechanical pencil that he is using to point things out.

It doesn't help that he is protected by an archangel, the supernatural equivalent of the Hulk, so he can't just eat him.

He has a momentary flash of panic at that thought, so clearly Jessica's and not his own, but then Chuck, who has something about him that puts Sam in mind of a ferret, taps his pencil against one of the plates and asks, "why didn't you ask Bobby about this?"

And Dean answers, "he only gets to ask one stupid question a year, and he wasted it in January asking if there was any more beer." And Chuck has the gall to look understanding as his brother laughs at him. He didn't ask Bobby because it wasn't important. "Bobby expects the stupid questions from me, but Sam, not so much."

Sam has questions, he has a barrel load of questions, but the prophet seems to think that the most important question isn't how this happening but how these paper plates represent Hell and why the seven pieces of macaroni glued to the top one are incredibly important and what this has to do with the Lord of the Rings still has Sam baffled. However it seems that just putting his head on the table and calling it a day aren't options.

The coffee is spiked, Chuck at least seems more neurotic about it than they are and a poster of Black Widow in a skin tight pvc suit is looking at him. All in all, this day could be worse, but Sam's not quite sure how yet. At least Perry isn't gnawing on Jeremy's leg this time.

The day hadn't started well ,with Jeremy bouncing on the bed bellowing out "King Jeremy the wicked rules his world." Dean had played the song in the car a few days before and it had since become the darkling's own personal anthem. That led to rows because there wasn't a song with King Perry the Wicked in the chorus let alone, Norman, Sid, or even Daisy Ray.

Sam's never hated Pearl Jam as much as he does now.

Perry has decided that Jeremy's leg, which is spindly and ends with a too large boot, is the absolute best thing to get that remaining piece of meat out of his teeth, which leads to Jeremy beating Perry on the head to the opening drum beats of "we will rock you" which the other darklings sing en masse, rocking back and forth with at least one of them having a flame on the end of it's thumb.

As migraines go this one has the potential to be world ending.

Chuck is explaining about something called Baphomay as Dean explains its pronounced Baphomit as in vomit and Sam groans. The universe seems determined to pick on him today, and he just wants some fresh air, some cola and ten minutes to himself.

He doesn't think he's been alone since the Darkness manifested in his head. "Look, you just sit here and plot the end of the world, I'm going to get some fresh air."

"Don't go too far," Dean says and the two of them continue their argument like Sam had never spoken up because apparently, according to Chuck, Clive Barker pronounces it Baphomay in "Nightbreed" and that's reason enough but Dean is saying that he's been to Hell and they pronounce it Baphomit and that's right, goddamnit. Sam just knows it's spelt Baphomet and of all the problems in the world right now, how it's pronounced is the least of his worries.

He sits down on the grass beside the path, the post from the mailbox against his back and plugs in his ipod, appreciating the afternoon sunlight even if it really isn't the weather for this.

It's nice, he thinks as he thumbs on the music, just being alone in his own head for a bit. Across the street a pair of curtains twitch but he decides that they can look all that they want, he's just going to bask in the sunlight and listen to music until the world ends. Seth said that the corruption would be whatever he wanted it to be, and right now he wants it gone. If only for a little while, just so he can think his own thoughts, and not hers, and just feel the warmth of the sun upon his skin.

In his head Fiona Apple sings Slow like Honey and steady with need and the sun is warm, though the wind is a little brisk, and it doesn't matter that lurking in the shadows is the manifestation of his own psychosis, or that in the house behind him his brother discusses literature with a prophet of the lord, just that for once there is nothing but the sunlight and the music.

Part of him isn't even sure if Clive Barker counts as a legitimate source so he laughs to himself and across the road the curtain twitches again as Chuck's neighbour decides that Sam is some sort of hoodlum, and there is a momentary temptation to scare her, but nothing more, and the sunlight bakes away Jessica's taint so that when she appears later she is in white, and not the inky black, and her hair is it's original blonde. It's funny how she looks sad.

When Dean comes out he just tugs the white wire from one ear and says "you know, he's not that bad, seems we like the same movies, looks like a ferret though." And Sam suspects that Dean might have made a friend for life, even if he does think that Chuck looks like a ferret.

***

Lilith's new host is deliberately chosen to look like their mother, to look like Jessica. It would probably be more powerful if Jessica didn't manifest in the darkness, so when she knocks on the door, wearing her dental hygienist and tries to strike a deal Sam knows he can destroy her. She thinks that they are at an impasse but Sam knows better.

Lilith is a duke of Hell, but Belial is a prince and Belial said that they were equal, that in his role as the Boy King he outranks Lilith and that's what terrifies her. He can taste the demon's fear in everything that she does. When she suggests sex to seal the deal the Darkness within him suggests a more palatable alternative and for all her intelligence she doesn't panic when he turns out the lights.

She doesn't know, he smiles, she doesn't know. Lilith thinks that she's all that but she doesn't know about the Darkness within him, about this coiling mass that inhabits him and how in the shadows away from the streetlights and broken motel sign how it opens it's jaws ready to consume her, it's tentacles lashing and Jessica sat there in the chair, legs crossed watching.

Dean opens the door and he has Chuck with him and Sam's carefully choreographed plan turns to shit, because Dean is there to save the day and Chuck's pet archangel sends Lilith scurrying off for cover like a cockroach and Sam wants to howl into the night but he can't and Dean can't understand that he was this close, this close, because Dean thinks he's done the right thing. Maybe he even has.

Chuck knows things, he knows too much, but he's not a bad person, he's not a threat to anything, even the spiders in his bathroom so Sam can't take it out on him, and Dean with his damn messiah complex had to "save the day" again and it's a cluster fuck, and there's nothing Sam can do about it. He slams the door on the bathroom as Dean patronises and pretends to understand but can't, and then Dean storms out of the room and Sam just perches on the edge of the bath with his head in his hands and breathes, slow ragged breaths through his nose until he can think straight, and sitting in a pool of water in the sink is Nigel, wearing a silly little balaclava with the ears cut out having a bath and Sam has to laugh because it's just so ridiculous.

For all their horrors Sam sometimes thinks that the Darklings exist just to make him laugh, that no matter how vile the world may be one of them might pull some stupid stunt just to amuse him. It doesn't make it better but it makes it bearable.

On the local news that night there is a fire, a dentist practice burned to the ground but no one was hurt. Sam wonders why it seems that fires follow him around.

When Dean comes back they don't talk about it. Sam realises that he and Dean haven't talked about a lot lately. In fact other than discussing the fact that they are now the unwitting stars in a series of crappy novels he and Dean haven't talked at all.

***

Reigert is sat on the bench at the carpark over looking the little town to the east and the lake to the south. He is sat, despite the fog, with his coat open to the weather eating an incredibly phallic looking ice cream bar. When he sees Sam he offers him a knowing half smile and moves along on the bench. "Just the monkey I was waiting for." He says brightly.

Unsure why he is back in the town, when he hasn't been since Zachariah pulled him out to place him in office drone purgatory, Sam sits down next to him. "These are the reason that Hell will never take over Britain," he says practically fellating the icecream, it's yellow and green twisted around a red core and the whole thing is quite obscene. "What I love about twinkies is that the world could end and the next species along in a million years could dig one up and it would still be as fresh as the day it was made," this is said with a rather ironic twist to the lips, "but these," he smacks his lips, "these are worth going to Britain for."

"I'm sure I'm not here because you are currently having an affair with your icecream," Sam says leaning back against the bench and pretending he can see the boats through the fog, he did the last time he was here.

"I didn't summon you," Reigert answers, "you have nothing I want, if either you or your brother kill Lilith I will be pleased but nothing more. I just wanted to see if you had done any better."

"Dean interrupted me." Sam grates because he's pissed about it, he was so close and Dean has to swoop in with the forces of Heaven and then act aggrieved because it's Sam's fault.

"Probably for the best," Reigert says. He pushes the icecream into his mouth and pulls it out with a wet pop that is frankly obscene, then licks his way up the twist of green sorbet. "Of course, you know you're not really a monkey anymore."

If Sam is surprised by that information he doesn't let it show. "I'm the Boy-king." He answers blithely.

Reigert grins around his ice-cream. "Yes," he said, "I told your brother than the hardest truth was that the wants of heaven and hell were the same, did he tell you that?"

"No," Sam answers.

Reigert nods sagely. "Do you know what I learned," he says, it's clearly rhetorical, and he takes a bite of his ice cream, "monkeys are fascinating creatures, they will do the strangest things, the stupidest things, and then they beat themselves up over it. Is it any wonder we want to maintain the status quo. If we're playing with the monkeys Heaven is free to fight it's war."

"Against the demons?" Sam asks.

"He really didn't tell you anything did he." Bored with his icecream the angel throws it over his shoulder where it lands in the grass. "Heaven isn't interested in this world, the angels weren't here not because they trusted mankind to do what was right, but because they were too busy fighting their own wars. You create an army of super powered soldiers and leave them to their own devices, they'll fight the first thing they find, even if it's themselves."

Sam knows better than to interrupt. "You and your brother are intermissions, Azazel played a game, a stupid game, got him killed, woke Lilith, got the angels to take notice, all to free Lucifer, and do you know what, he could have done it without all the fuss and bother except," Reigert leans in as if to share a secret, "we wouldn't let him."

"The Seven."

Reigert offers him a smile that is almost a smirk, "Do you think Hitler woke up at two in the morning lamenting the horrors he wrought?" He asks, "or did Oppenheimer? Only one of them's in Hell, Sam. We wouldn't condemn this world, not when it's so much fun."

 

 

"Raise Lucifer, don't raise Lucifer, it doesn't matter. The angels didn't fall for the act of siring children on humanity, but instead for loving humanity more than god. It was the first act in their war. It's still the sword that cuts the deepest. Very few angels love humans, but I love the lost souls, I love the anguish that comes of doing the right thing no matter how evil it is, just as Belial loves the pleasure pain dichotomy and Asmodeus revels in war. We have our games, but if humanity is destroyed then there will be no more playing field.

"I told Dean and I'll tell you, Heaven wants Lilith stopped so she can't raise Lucifer, we want Lilith stopped so she can't usurp his power. Of course, no one has asked Lucifer what he wants." He laughs to himself. "Make your own mind up, Sam-I-am, will you serve the needs of Heaven or of Hell, or" he leans in so his breath is ice cream sweet on Sam's face, "under all the posturing and threatening and smiting, was it always the same thing all along?"


	14. In which Sam discovers the Red Queen

Alchemilla Hospital is almost derelict. Lights hang from the ceiling, some sputtering bars of white against the walls. The walls are covered in some sort of black sticky moss, but it does not have the life of the other place where the walls reached out to grab. It's just dirt and grime taking it's toll on this place.

Reigert had been specific. "You've fallen down the rabbit hole," he said, as she stood up, stuffing his hands into his pockets, "go find the white queen. The red queen, she has an agenda, but the white queen. She waits."

Glad at least it's not the usual Lord of the Rings references Sam pressed him. "And where does she wait?"

"You can't tell?" Reigert was surprised. "Do you know what Dragon lines are?" He asked, "there are a number of universe, finite, but so many that even we could never comprehend their number, and each exists now and here, like a pile of transparencies dropped on the floor. Where these universes butt against ours they form Dragon lines. Where these lines cross are places of power, in the old world they would put shrines there. But sometimes more than one line crosses. In the House of Five Aspects 5 lines cross, reality is blurred there. It is possible to enter a room and go back in time. Here the lines make a rather unique symbol." He knelt down and in the gravel of the carpark drew a square and then drew the lines from each point to meet in the centre. Water eases the transition. This place, it's not real, well as real as anything else. But she's there, waiting, where the lines cross."

"I still don't understand." Sam said, he couldn't figure out at all why this was important.

Reigert rolled his eyes and decided to throw away the crypticism. "She's in the basement of Alchemilla hospital. Someday I will understand how your species lasted so long, because I wonder if you can even feel the change of the seasons." And then he was gone.

So Sam began the trek to Alchemilla hospital.

***

Lisa waits in the doctor's office, the bed wedged between the cupboard and the wall to create a place for her to hide. She still has her knees pressed to her chest. "You came back," she says, "no one ever comes back."

"I need your help," he says, "I need to get to the basement."

If anything Lisa is even more scared than she was before, she starts to cry. "No, no, not there, you dont' want to go there. She's there."

"Who, Lisa, who's in the basement?" He thinks if he can coax her past her fear he might get the answers.

"Alessa's down there." She answers, "she's been down there so long, but if you go down you won't come back, no one ever does. Others have gone down there, but no one comes back."

"What's her name, Lisa, what's her full name? I can come in the day time, I can come when it's safe if I know her name."

"Alessa," she repeats, "Alessa Gillespie."

***

Her name is Alessa Gillespie and like everything else in this fucked up town she's not quite right.

The window in her hospital room over looks the lake, which is two miles from here in the opposite direction, despite that her room is in the basement.

No matter what direction Sam approaches her from he only sees the back of her head and shoulders. She is wearing a bed jacket of a soft slubby wool and her hair is a black bob with a razor sharp line where it is cut. She could be any age from twelve to fifty and Sam wouldn't know, but also that she doesn't want him to know.

She has a heavy photo album open on her flower printed lap but her attention is fixed on the lake and the lighthouse there. From where he stands he sees an abandoned theme park like a dark grey blot with brightly coloured flashes. There are flags and he can hear the boats on the water.

"So, you are the Boy-King," it is a statement not a question. "Welcome to my world, the world that you gave me, welcome to dear sweet Silent Hill." There is a flash of fire, as if for an instant she is immolated, the air stinking of burning meat, and there is a great scream but it, like the fire, like the smell, was suddenly gone as if it had never been there. "So tell me, do you prefer Sam, or Sammael?"

She laughs and again there is the moment of screaming, of fire, the world flashes with rust and blood and desolation, the windows blacked out and the plastic curtains blood spattered and torn, then the room is fine again, making Sam question what the fuck is going on.

"You came too late." She sing songs, "far too late, and she got away, but time is different here, upside down and back to front, twisted, broken and put back together wrong. We waited." Her voice is lilting, her cadences arching and dropping like she's chanting a child's rhyme. "Alessa waited so long, so very long, we waited and waited, and Cheryl came and we waited, and the fire!"

The room blazes for a long moment, Sam can feel the heat on his face, searing to the point of blistering. It hits him like a slap, and then it is gone, and the dark rust and blood desolation remains in it's place. There are picture frames on the wall with butterflies batting their wings futilely. He can hear them.

"The fire, Sam, you know the fire, don't you. They said I was a witch, they said I was a demon, because I had powers, you have powers don't you, Sam?"

Sam can hear children singing Oranges and Lemons, their patent leather shoes slapping on the tarmac. Then the same tune becomes "Alessa's a witch in her mother's gold bangles. She'll eat up your soul and her hair is all tangles." Then another voice, seperate as the others sing, "d'ya know what they do to witches, Alessa?" Sam can feel his hair pulled hard, "they burn them, you're going to burn, Alessa, you're going to burn."

"No demon can be as cruel as a child, Sam, but I did burn and burn and burn." She tilts her head, a gesture that reminds Sam of Castiel, "for seven years I burned and burned and burned." She spits the words out with true vitriol. "Do you know what it sounds like to burn, Sam, do you know you don't hear the fire, just your skin bubbling. I burned, Sam, for you, for you!"

The wall of flame engulfs them both and Alessa stands up, she is wearing a school uniform and her hair is long, she is at most seven years old. "I burned, Sam, and I waited, and I waited, and do you know why? For you. All for you. I burned up all for you, and then I waited here, in this room for God to come to me, and you come now! You're over twenty years too late."

The fire is consuming her, licking at the polyester of her school uniform, up her legs which are red and angry, her hair vanishing in a wisp of flame. "I'm dead and gone, Sam, I burned twice over, and now Heather waits for you, are you going to let her burn too? Like I did, all the fire, Sam, all those flames, all for you. I waited seven years in this room, burning," there is a design on the floor, an alchemical circle but he doesn't recognise it, "because you were too late."

She stops, and composes herself with her little girl face, "but it's okay, Sam, I'm not angry, not anymore." She returns to her chair facing the window and Sam wonders if he can only see the back of her head because she is so burned, if her skin is blistered and split. The dead butterflies are beating their wings so hard that it rattles the glass on the shadowboxes. "Heather is waiting for you, she's in the lighthouse, waiting. She's been waiting a long time, so very long, seven long years."

"Who's Heather, Alessa?" he asks. It's the first thing he's said to her.

Alessa laughs, a dark morbid sound. "Even the Boy King needs his queen."

"Hey Sammy," Dean says shaking him, "wake up, rise and shine, those monsters don't hunt themselves you know." Sam tries to shake the sleep from his head, like a dog in a car accident. Alessa has left a strange taste in his mouth, like roast pork, but she gave him something else, he thinks as he mutters to his brother and gets out of the bed. She named the town in his dreams. Silent Hill.

The strange thing is that the name is familiar and he doesn't know why. "Sammy, rise and shine, I'm huuuuuunnnnnggggrrrrryyyyyy." Dean elongates the word and for a second he sounds just like the Darkness. "If I don't get some meat in me soon I'm going to wither away and die."

Sam, still half asleep, still puzzling over Alessa's strange pronouncements, doesn't miss the opportunity to raise his eyebrow at his brother. "TMI, dude," he says, "I do not need to know what you do with other people." And Dean says he hasn't got a bitchface...

Breakfast is a quiet affair because Sam takes the opportunity, whilst shovelling in oatmeal to try and fill the gaping hole inside him, and the smell of Dean's bacon makes him want to retch in the memory of Alessa and the smell that lingered around her, to read John's journal. Dean, has enough appetite for both of them, and possibly the Darkness combined, washing it down with slurps of black coffee with so much sugar it's a wonder it maintains liquidity.

There is a note next to several torn out pages and two more that are heavily redacted. It says that Silent Hill is a bust, that the missing people seem to have more to do with the local lake than the town's albeit fantastic history. John heard of the town and researched it, that he decided it was a bust doesn't surprise Sam, some places keep their secrets close.

"Anything interesting, Sammy," Dean is a terribly good mood and Sam doesn't know why, maybe he went out to meet his angel boyfriend, Sam sneers internally at that, the Darkness growling within him. Although Dean's not usually this cheery just because he got laid. Perhaps there was chocolate involved.

Suddenly the raisins in the oatmeal, little bursts of sweetness, aren't as good as they were just a moment ago. His mouth waters at the thought of chocolate and sweat and pheromones and firelight, and there it is again, the smell of burnt bacon and he wants to retch. He covers it up with a mouthful of coffee. "I think I've found us a case," he says after he swallows, "probably a seal, ever hear of a town called Silent Hill?"

***

Google can sometimes be a mine of information about the supernatural, and sometimes a waste of time. People learn things and post them on their own pages but Silent Hill has plenty of information, just most of it is contradictory. The photos from the town's tourism site however confirms it for him, it is the right place. That it makes it's money from tourism Sam finds unsettling. One site, run by a woman who has pictures of herself with bright purple hair and a broomstick skirt and calls herself White Witch Endora, talks frankly about the strange history of the town. She lists her address as Brahms, one of the neighbouring towns. Her website also sells a lot of strange crystals, seals and is attached to a tattoo parlour for those who want alchemical designs, offering specials on those from the anime "Full Metal Alchemist".

Endora is of the opinion that Silent Hill is just plain bad news and that you should stock up on every single supernatural protection charm and then avoid the town completely.

Knowing the little that he does of the town Sam is inclined to agree.

He has his laptop open on his knee in the car, as Dean drives, it's a long way to Buffalo which is the nearest city to the town, and his charge is running out fast. But whatever kind of kook that this Endora is her research is detailed.

It seems the town, which is near the Canadian border, was the ritual ground for a tribe of Native Americans whose name was lost after skirmishes with the invading puritans. Both the Native Americans and the puritans died in an epidemic. Alchemilla Hospital was built to try and stop the disease but it was eventually abandoned.

It was to prove to be the first step in a long pattern.

For a hundred years the town lay vacant until it was reopened as a penal colony, including one of the world's first panopticons - which is now open to the public - before another epidemic wiped out the prisoners, despite the best efforts of the newly rebuilt hospital. It served as a prisoner of war camp for the war of 1812. The panopticon was closed in 1840, and the town abandoned again.

In the 1850's some enterprising local discovered coal and the town became a boom town, Old Silent Hill being built. During the American civil war the most dissident of the Southern prisoners of war were sent there and another prison was opened, the panopticon considered cursed.

It was around this time that the doomsday cults began to spring up around the town claiming to use the religion of the unnamed Native American tribe, that through devotion, sacrifice and loss that they would be the most devoted to "God" who would be born in their midst. Relics from this period included silver discs embossed with the Seal of Solomon, which Sam knew better as the Devil's trap, the Seal of Metraton and the Seal of Sammael, all of which Endora was offering as tattoos.

In the 1920's the order, to fund it's work, began trafficking a local herb called "White Claudia," this was stopped when their actions resulted in the death of several well known policemen from Brahms.

The Order was brought to a head in 1979 following a house fire in which a small girl, Alessa Gillespie, died. Her mother was institutionalised, her doctor struck off and imprisoned, as several people vanished during the period and he was held accountable for their murders.

In 1986 there was another wave of disappearances, including Brahms police officer Cybil Bennett, which caught media attention but even the FBI who were called in could find nothing strange about the town.

In 2003 a fire at...

Sam curses as his battery finally gives up the ghost, the screen going black although the power light is still on. He closes it with a final clack, sliding it back into it's satchel before reaching around to put it on the back seat. He feels a little nauseous from reading in the car, though he thinks he should be used to that by now, he's been doing it all his life. So he cranks down the window a little, and wonders why Dean doesn't just get a new car already, even if he knows all the reasons by heart.

"You find anything interesting?" Dean asks, he has removed his green jacket and his forearms are bare, making the strange charm bracelet on his arm stand out all the more proud. The white bead, the one that makes Sam uncomfortable, is shining wetly in the light.

"Town's asking for hauntings," Sam says, "demon worship, false gods, no fewer than three separate plagues, used as a prisoner of war camp twice, a penal colony and a coal town. It has a population of less than a thousand and two hospitals, and a sanatarium I think that says it all."

Dean scoffs, "let me guess, missing children..." he throws the suggestion out there.

"A bucket load, an orphanage full of suicides, not one but two serial killers in the last fifteen years." Sam fills in the information, it wasn't on Endora's website but it was on another.

"And every hunter that visited the place found it a bust?" Sam had told Dean that earlier. "Yanno," he starts, "in Chicago, I met Reigert at this mall, he said some places had such evil there that they became part of Hell without demonic interference, that they just handed it over, that the evil was so soaked in the place that Hell didn't even have to bother." The golden feather catches the light from Dean's window, lining against his forearm like a brand of ownership, even more than the handprint on his arm. It's a reminder of all the things Dean's done that Sam is not privy to, that Dean never told him about. "So it sounds like this place is fucked up from the left side down."

"Yeah," Sam agrees, "I think we might need Cas here." As soon as the words are out he can see the potential of it, the town has one angel trapped here, why not another?


	15. In which the Boy King completes his quest

Sam meets Dean in a little mom and pop diner, his brother is eating meatloaf with lots of mustard, the biohazard yellow variety that is probably the cause of most cancers in the US. Castiel sits facing him with a root beer in a glass. It's the first time Sam's seen the angel either eat or drink at all. He has hung his trench over the back of the wooden chair next to him and is watching Dean tuck into the food like he hasn't eaten in weeks. His expression is a cross between bemused and bewildered. There are boiled potatoes on the plate, swimming in butter, and green beans although Dean is usually of the opinion that you can leave the green stuff to the side.

"So, how far to the town?" Dean asks. Sam had gone to get a better map after all, the ones they had were twenty years out of date and showed a bridge as the best way to get into the town despite it being closed off for this century. So they stopped off in South Ashfield to get more maps. The woman in the book store was of the same opinion Sam keeps hearing about the town, "Silent Hill, seriously, man, you don't want to go there," like it was Chernobyl and not a vacation hot spot. She had been flirting up to ringing the books through and seeing a history of "Silent Hill."

He gave her a grin, the washed out version of his brother's that seems to work regardless, "I'm writing a book," he said, "the paranormal hotspots based on bad histories, you know how a messed up history can become a bad aura and be mistaken for hauntings and things."

She just looked at him. "Silent Hill isn't fucked up because of it's history, it's history is fucked up because of Silent Hill." After that she was just perfunctory ringing up the books without question and putting them into a blank carrier, rather than the ones printed with the shop's logo. "Good luck," she said as he was leaving, "with your book, but I wouldn't go there if you paid me. Seriously, my aunt vanished there." He thanked her for her concern and when he looked at the receipt he saw the name Alice Bennett. She was Cybill Bennett's niece. That was when he turned back. "You ever hear of a girl called Alyssa Gillespie?" he asked, "In Silent Hill."

"Her mom set her on fire." Alice answered without blinking, "and you wanna go there, they've got some messed up religion and set fire to kids, it's like a cult, only thing missing is the kool-aid." Sam nodded, his research had turned that up.

"What about a girl called Heather Mason? She was one of the last disappearances." Sam had found out her surname through good old fashioned research.

The girl shrugged. "Folks vanish in Silent Hill," she said, "my theory, the order takes them, burns them up for their god, Sammael or whatever his name is. Whole place is a mess, I used to go there with my mom when I was really small, before my aunt vanished. It was nice meeting you, professor," she told him, "if you get out, swing back this way, we'll celebrate you not vanishing into the void." She tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder in a dismissive gesture. "But you get burned up by those red hooded nutjobs, don't you blame me, I warned you."

So he goes back to where Dean is doing his best to inhale the rather good looking food whilst Castiel watches him with a mix of horror and adoration. He thinks it might be the first time the angel has seen Dean eat, and then to Dean's consternation the angel reaches over and steals a forkful of his meatloaf and pops it into his own mouth.

Sam is almost as surprised as Dean, he remembers from his own childhood that stealing food from Dean's plate was a forking offence, Dean would happily stab the offender in the hand with his fork, even their Dad.

In the shadows at the back of the diner the Darklings are playing, frolicking and fighting over stray fries that have fallen to the floor, and one, Jeremy, Sam guesses, is chewing on a sandal that the owner has shucked off. He doesn't want to think what state she'll get it back in, definitely sopping though.

"You said you weren't hungry," Dean moans as Castiel takes another forkful, this time with potato and green beans all on the fork. "I offered to get you some."

"I'm not." Castiel answers calmly, and popped the fork into his mouth. "I am merely intrigued." He seems smug. "This place is famed throughout the area for it's meatloaf, you said that, I wished to try it. The last piece was all mustard." It's a couple's moment, a proto argument, Castiel is teasing and trying to get Dean to bite. It also suggests their intimacy if Dean hasn't pulled out a shotgun and opened fire on him for daring to steal his food. Dean has never been that close to anyone before, and for a moment Sam is happy for him, before the darkness' roiling jealousy overwhelms him and he waves over the waitress.

When it was just sex Sam found it easier to cope, but this clearly, whatever it is between them, isn't just sex. That hurts, even under the jealousy, Sam realises. Dean has someone else in his life, and Sam only has the Darkness. He orders for both himself and Castiel. Perversely, rather than getting the angel the meatloaf he gets him the vegetarian lasagna that caught Sam's own eye. The Darkness eats enough meat for all of them.

"It seems," Sam starts, twisting the conversation so it suits him, "that there is a girl missing, vanished from LA seven years ago."

"What's that got to do with this town?" Dean asks through a mouthful of potato.

"Born here," Sam answers, "her sister is one of the missing, a Cheryl Mason, her name's Heather. Seventeen years after her sister's disappearance pretty much to the day she goes out shopping and is never seen again, her father is left in pieces over the apartment, according to the police report he looked like something out of "Nightmare on Elm Street", and i'm quoting there." He drums his fingers on the table. "But sometimes when people go missing here, they show up years later, fine, talking about monsters made of scissors, great strong men dragging swords as big as cars, creatures that spit acid, sounds like Hell Beasts to me. So there's still a possibility the girl is alive."

"My superiors are wary of interfering with the town." Castiel said. "It is in a place of great geomancy, the lines of reality are blurred there, many dragon lines cross and overlap, and with so much water it is not unlikely that there will be creatures not of your reality. One of my brothers was sent, a long time ago, to investigate. He never returned. It is likely that he was lapsed into one of the other realities that exist there, perhaps one is more dominant than the others and that is the one into which the people vanish." He looked like he had given it quite a bit of thought, perhaps even research. "It is likely that the reality in question is one in which Hell is more dominant hence the creatures that the survivors describe. Precautions can be taken to prevent such lapses, the simple wearing of silver will, for example." Castiel doesn't gesture when he talks, he remains almost perfectly inhumanly still. "Of course the same material can be used to exterminate such monsters. It is not uncommon for things to slip through where dragon lines cross."

Dean just looks at him, but Sam can at least pretend to understand because Reigert tried to explain this to him, dragon lines are where universes cross, a perfectly normal fact of life, and where the dragon lines cross things can slip through, it might be where monsters come from, Sam thinks, and in that place where so many of them cross it's strong.

"so basically," Dean says, "you're saying it's fucked up from the left side down."

Castiel almost smiles, it's there at the corner of his mouth, a soft fondness and gentleness that the angel has for his brother, perhaps, Sam thinks, sitting directly under a bright and powerful lamp, bleaching away the Darkness, that it might be love. He doesn't like it but he is aware that this dislike is his own for now. "That," Castiel answers, "is a rather succinct way to describe it."

"and what do your superiors say about you helping us here?" Sam presses.

"I am to do everything in my power to protect Dean as the Righteous Man." Castiel answers with that same brevity. He doesn't waste words, this angel. "Nevertheless I do feel that simple protections might be worth taking advantage of. If this town is as dangerous as your research indicates then it would be foolish not to take precautions."

"Lots of hunters found this place a bust, Cas," Sam says, "I mean they found nothing."

"Which would be logical, if they were wearing such protections, surely it would prevent the universes leeching over them, if the anomaly does not manifest for them surely they would think that the stories were merely hearsay and describe it as a," he pauses, looking for the word, "bust."

"Makes sense," Dean says as the waitress puts the other two plates on the table with a tired smile, "hey, June," Dean always makes a point to learn and use the waitress' names, no matter where they are, "could I get a top up?" he grins at her and she does that flutter that girls always do when Dean grins at them, she mutters a no problem sugar, as she sashays off swinging her hips. She's not Dean's type, and he's in front of his, Sam hesitates at the word boyfriend, but Dean is still flirting. "You know what, I think we'll get a room in South Ashfield tonight."

***

Silent Hill looks suspiciously normal, it's a bright sunny day and there are people wandering down the streets of the old town, including a young woman pushing a stroller as she talks on her cell phone. It doesn't look like the town Sam has been to before, but he knows it is, he recognises the streets, the buildings, but without the fog it seems like it could be any town in America. Sam stops one of the walkers, this one is a young girl wearing a tee that reads, Vini, Vidi, Visa, to ask for directions to the lake, which she is happy to give him. She tells him the easiest way is to go straight down Bachman and he can't miss it, but she doesn't know why he wants to go there, all the interesting stuff is up here in Old Silent Hill. He tells her he has arranged to meet someone, she smiles and flirts with him a little, but Sam doesn't really care for her manner.

Toluca Lake is the one he remembers from the times he was there before, when Reigert cleared the fog from the observation deck so he could see, and what he saw from Alessa's window in the hospital, although he knows that the hospital is nowhere near. He found it on the map and it's on the other side of the town, but he can see the lighthouse clearly. He knows, knows, that Heather is there. The little girl said that when he asked, told him that she was waiting in the lighthouse. As far as he can tell the best way to get to the lighthouse is through the old Lakeside Amusement Park then crossing in a boat from the hotel beside it.

Lakeside Amusement Park has been abandoned for at least twenty years. It's gone to rot and rust, moss and mould growing over everything, but there is a metal statue of a pink rabbit with the paint flaking and there is a huge red rust stain around it's mouth making it look twisted and vampiric. Dean looks around, makes sure no one is there, before he shoots it in the head. In many ways Sam doesn't really blame him, the thing is freaky, and the Darklings are in the shadows cheering Dean on. If it was dark he thinks that the imps would surge over it and destroy it, they would ride the carousel and play, but it's daylight and they're not at their strongest, so instead they talk and heckle and cavort, just as disturbing as the rabbit, but invisible to most.

They end up crossing the lines of the old roller coaster and then jumping over the fence to Sandord Street before they steal the rowboat to take them to the lighthouse. "My brother is there." Castiel says quietly as they push the boat into the water, "I can feel him."

Sam can too, he can taste him, old incense and smudged gold leaf, but he's encountered this place's angel before. He runs the name that Castiel gave him before over his tongue, _Valtiel. _ He remembers Dean saying that only an angel can kill an angel and wonders if it will come to that.

The lighthouse is like a spike in the lake, a small outcropping of land on the water, and the determined upthrust of what is a decorative folly. She's there, he knows, his Queen, and this close, he can feel her, and taste her on the air, under the rot, the taint, the wet stink of the lake, and the Darkness purrs with him, and it's hunger, for a second, flares white hot, and then recedes. "I wonder what she tastes like," Jessica whispers in the dark of his ear, but Sam already knows, she'll taste of corruption.

In his head, though he does not know what she looks like, she wears gold and lace, a fantasy outfit worthy of Ming's Princess Aura, but she has a hauteur that is her own. She will wear dresses made of spider lace so very fine that it will appear to be flowers, woven so tight that it tears the very rocks she crosses, her black hair fixed around a crown of elaborate wirework, perhaps the hair of furies studded with the eyes of the dark things that lurk in the shadows of Hell. She will be beautiful, and terrible as the twilight. She will be a seduction and a torture. She will be his Queen; the Boy King recognises this; The Darkness recognises this; Sam's opinion obviously doesn't matter.

He can see her so clearly, but does not know her face, and her name is something other people have given him, in Hell she will have a new name, he knows that, the Boy-King and demon blood and Darkness know that, but for now she's Heather. For now she's alone in the town- for seven years. He's coming, and he can feel it, like a red string tied between them, pulling tight.

When the three of them step into the lighthouse, through the broken door, the world changes, back to what Sam knows, fog behind and abandoned industrial ahead, and there, between Sam and his Queen is the dragon, the angel, Valtiel. He is running on instinct and if it was not for Castiel's hand on his shoulder Sam would have manifested in all his darkness to bring him down.

Valtiel is as corrupt as everything else in this town. He is naked apart from the leather butcher's apron and the sigil branded into his shoulder. His skin is raw fish grey streaked with black and old blood. His face has been removed, unmade with cuts, and the skin from his chest sewn over the wound in patches with large clumsy black stitches. His wings are absent, and his legs turned inwards so he is pigeon toed, but his toes are long since gone, leaving clubs of meat in the place of feet. His hands are similarly disfigured, the gaps between the fingers severed down almost to the wrist with surgical precision so he can retain their use. The back of his head is entirely skinless and a dull matted mess of old hair, scabs and pus. The smell of him is of blood and old sex.

"Brother," Castiel sounds forlorn, but Sam can see the short sword in his hand, chrome white and elegantly deadly. "Sam, Dean and I will deal with this, find the girl."

The angel does not roar or charge, he just stumbles towards them, and Sam skirts around him to the stairs, but he sees Castiel stabbing him through the heart in a single devoted motion. Then before the body falls he uses the point of it to gouge out his eyes, and catches the body, it is a clean quick motion of balletic grace. He kisses it on the forehead and murmurs something. Sam turns away to find Heather as the body is laid out for cremation. Sam knows this, it can't be left behind.

Jeremy gets to the door at the top before Sam does, pushing it open to the frenzied barking of a dog and then the de-de-de-de-de of machine gun fire, Jeremy slithers back to him, legs shot out from under him. "Boss, she's magnificent." he says and for the first time Sam sees Heather, the Boy King surveys his queen, in torn and stained jeans holding an uzi like she knows how to use it, and she is beautiful and powerful.

"Come any closer," she says, "and I'll riddle you too." Her voice is husky with disuse, "I'm not that low on ammo."

"I've come to rescue you." He says, pushing the darklings back into the shadows behind him, he doesn't want to upset her, the Darkness will protect him from the bullets, he can feel it curling over him like armour. "I've come to take you from this place."

Her laugh is dark and bitter. "I'm not a princess in the tower," she lowers the muzzle of the gun before hooking it on her belt, "I'll show you the way back to the main town, maybe you can find your way out there." She lifts the dog, a miniature chiba inu which is barking at him.

"I came here to rescue you." He maintains.

She looks him up and down, "I doubt you could rescue yourself from the bathroom." That's when Dean and Castiel finish the steps, the smell of burning pork behind them. Dean grins, punches Sam on the arm and tells him that she's a keeper, the inference being mostly because she can't stand him. Dean can't feel what Sam can though, that red string pulled taut, and the Boy King recognising the Queen prepared for him.


	16. In which the Hell's queen is as dangerous as her king

Dean is finding the whole thing funny, and he doesn't even know the half of it. So Sam is sat on a park bench in the strange town, with a handkerchief over his nose, head down, bridge pinched tight as Castiel consoles Heather. As if she wasn't the one who broke Sam's nose. Dean just keeps laughing. Castiel has draped his trench coat over her shoulders and she's shuddering with anger, and fear and something Sam doesn't recognise and the sight of the sky freaked her, so Sam put his hand on her shoulder and bam! She broke his nose.

From a vending machine Dean hands her a can of mountain dew because her hands are shaking, which they weren't when they broke Sam's nose! he admits he's having a bit of trouble getting past that part. Sure the girl's traumatised, Sam thinks, but he's got a broken nose!

She sees the can and bursts into tears, but the only person she'll let touch her is Castiel, and he is awkward as she sobs into his shoulder, holding the can away from his back. Seven years, Sam thinks, she's been stuck there for seven years, for a moment he almost understands why she is blown so wide open, but then his nose hurts and he allows himself a little more self pity, even if the bleeding has mostly stopped. The bruising is going to be epic, and of course Dean won't let him forget that it was a girl who did it, and not even one that's demon possessed.

Heather's not a big person, wiry with curves gone to athleticism, and hard edged. Her hair is black except for patches of old blonde dye where it has grown out and not been cut. She's wearing it in a loose pony, twisted into a knot. She has wide light coloured eyes and pale skin with freckles, like Dean, but her skin has a sort of unhealthy light from not having seen the sun in years. She's going to be gorgeous but at the moment she's tired, scared and sickly. Her tee is torn and her jeans ruined.

"We'll have to get her some clothes." Sam says through the handkercheif over his nose, "and find her somewhere safe."

"And we can't take her to the police because?" Dean asks, crossing his arms around Heather's small dog which he's holding, one arm under his chest, the other above absentmindedly skritching it behind the ears. The dog is lost in canine glee, mouth open and tongue lolling, proof that at least one of them is appreciating being rescued.

"They think I killed my father." Heather sobs into Castiel's shirt. The angel is awkwardly patting her back. "I, Claudia," she manages, "I can't."

"did you?" Dean asks. Even the dog looks at him.

"No, Claudia," she manages again. "I wanna," she manages sniffing back snot loudly, "I just wanna go home." Castiel looks incredibly awkward as she clings to him, "Valtiel," the word comes out of the mumbling.

"Bilquis," Dean says, "I'll phone her and see if she can stay there for a while." He looks indignant as they look at him, "we can't take her with us."

"Do you want to owe her a favour?" Castiel asks, trying to soothe the girl who had flung herself into his arms.

"Do you see another choice? I know, let's call Bobby, hey Bobby, look we found this girl in a really fucked up alternate reality, but it's alright, she's only touchy and has a machine gun!" Even Dean is freaked out now, or jealous, but the dog is fine and happy, snuggling up to his chest in glee and adoration. The dog is cute but Dean doesn't even notice, he is running on auto pilot, skritching away at the animal's ears.

"Heather," Heather says turning, "my name is Heather, and that's Gilby," she's gone past sobbing to anger.

"Seriously?" Dean asks, excitedly, "like Gilby Clarke, Gilby." Of course Dean would make the rock reference.

"He screams," Heather tells him and her tone is dark, "sounds like Axl Rose, made sense to me." She wipes at her eyes and then her hands on Castiel's trench coat, draped over her shoulders. "I'm done." She tells them, "done with this town, down with all this crap. I'm done crying over it, I'm done with you, and now I want my dog." She holds her arms out and Gilby starts wriggling and reaching for her, Dean passes her over and she puts him on the ground. "I'm fine, I'll find my own way back to LA."

Dean looks guilty for a moment. "Look, there's no need for you to, we can drive you to Buffalo where you can get a bus or something."

"Don't put yourself out." She says, she shucks off Cas' coat.

"It's fine," Castiel says putting it back on her shoulders. "It will hide your arsenal." Because with the machine gun she also has a Japanese samurai sword, several knives and a 9mm. "It is also customary to accept such offers of hospitality when they are presented, it not like you have many other options." Castiel is blunt, and sometimes offensive, and sometimes his truth is overwhelming. When the light is bright and the Darkness faint Sam can almost like him. "You must remain hungry," he takes the can from her hand and pops it open with deft fingers, before giving it back. "There are little treasures in this world, in a free can of soda or a hand to help you up." He turns to Dean, "I'll take her back to the motel in South Ashfield, Sam, you can accompany us, if you will get her some clothes and food." Dean nods, he seems used to taking orders from the angel, which is odd because Dean doesn't usually take orders from anyone, at least not without a bitch load of arguing first.

"good by me," Dean answers, "angel express always backs me right up," he pats his stomach, "I'll meet you there." Then Castiel has his hand on Sam's arm, the other on the space between Heather's shoulders and then they are at the motel, and Heather shucks off the coat, the sword and the machine gun, just letting them fall on the floor as she puts the dog on the bed. It looks at Sam with disdain before turning around a few times to get itself comfortable.

"There's a shower here, right?" Heather asks Castiel, completely ignoring Sam who needs a beer.

"Through there." Castiel tells her softly and gestures with his head, "do you wish me to wait until Dean returns?"

"What are you?" She asks, but she's already undressing, belt slithering out of it's loops to fall with it's knife to the floor at her feet, old sneakers toed off to reveal bare feet.

"I am an angel of the Lord," he answers, "and you are safe here, with them." Sam takes one of the beers out of the motel refridgerator, popping open the lid on the counter, there's an indent where it seems everyone else has done it too. He wonders for a moment if Heather wants one too, but she's pulling her tee over her head to reveal an old and stained bra, it's a sort of gone grey in the wash pink, and her skin is grey with old dirt. There are old bruises down her arm, gone to purple and yellow and brown even as she steps out of her ruined jeans. She stands there in her old bra and panties, with a 9mm through the waistband, her hair pulled free by the tee and the Boy King surges within him, it's something he recognises, a lust that's not his own, and she must feel it too, because the look she gives Sam is challenging, as if daring him to try.

"the water pressure's shit," Sam says and takes a long slug of the beer. Heather just arches an eyebrow and walks into the bathroom, but she doesn't close the door entirely.

"Seven years in Hell," Castiel says to Sam bluntly, "it is longer than most manage, and do not be dissuaded, that place, the otherworld we entered at the top of the lighthouse, it was Hell, or at least part of it." He sits on the bed next to the dog who is at first disgruntled by the angel and then decides to climb against him for heat. He keeps his canine gaze fixed on Sam. Castiel is worried about her.

Dean came back from wherever he went with Castiel with a dog that stays with Bobby, looks like Sam got himself a queen and one too. He can hear the water running and the Darkness and the Boy King are telling him to go in there, to take what's his, what she has challenged him with, to make her understand that if she is queen then he is king, but she's a stranger and she broke his nose and seven years in hell make the decision easy. He stays where he is.

***

When Heather shakes out the hoodie and asks, "Team Silver Bullet, what the hell's that?" Dean practically proposes marriage there and then and tells Sam with a sort of manic glee that she's certainly a keeper. She's got a towel wrapped around her, over the old bra and panties, and her hair twisted up with another one. Sam can't help but look at her bare feet, the arch of them, elegant and strong. He's never been a foot person so why hers fascinate him he doesn't know. "These should fit," she says pulling out the jeans, then a multi pack of sensible panties and a few practical sports bras. Its entirely the last kind of lingerie that Sam would think his brother would buy. The clothes are Walmart chic, comfortable, practical and fluid, but cotton panties and tee shirt bras aren't the sort of thing Dean usually considers.

She pulls the jeans on under the towel, without care who sees her, her skin is still grey despite the washing, with pink blotches from the water turned too hot, but there are bruises all over her, some look like fingerprints and a wave of jealousy seethes inside Sam. She is his. She belongs only to him.

Rather than face that thought Sam opens another beer, holding this one out to her. She has the jeans pulled on, the towel tugged away and her old bra, lace torn and padding showing as the only covering. The skin underneath it is squeezed tight and she almost erupts from the cups. She's been wearing it for a long time and clearly doesn't realise how badly it fits, perhaps it was the only option she had. Sam doesn't know enough about bras to judge her size but judging by the way she reaches around and unhooks the one she's wearing she doesn't care.

Her back is scarred and beautiful. The muscles taut and luscious as she pulls the sports bra over her head and down, then reaches into the bra to rearrange herself. Sam's speechless, she has the manner of a queen with no concept of nudity amongst those born to serve her. She is arrogant in her own flesh and has cause to be- she makes his mouth water.

It is Dean however who just got flashed. Dean just grins and mutters thanks with real appreciation.

With the bra on she pulls on a skinny fit tee and then the dark blue hoodie, which is vastly oversized and chosen deliberately for that. "Thanks," she says to Dean, and it's pronounced like she might say "go to hell," she's accepting their charity because she has no choice but she'd really rather just go and leave the town burning in her wake.

She's fragile and brutal and defiant and magnificent and Sam is in awe of her, and a little afraid, but the Boy King recognises her and wants to subjugate, the Darkness wants to consume, and Sam- Sam's not sure what he wants.

Gilby is easier to read, the little dog is pawing at the bag Dean brought in, trying to see if there's anything in it for him. Dean's more interested in the animal than the woman that was practically naked in front of him. He laughs to himself as he fishes out a small foil square, pops the lid on it and lays it down before the dog, "there you go, buddy," he says. "Dog food," he says to Sam, "not tuna, I learned that lesson last time, and man, I thought you were toxic." The dog doesn't bother looking at Dean just tucks into whatever it is he offered hm.

"As you have returned," Castiel tells Dean, "I shall return to my duties, I have lingered overlong as it is. Miss Heather," he bows his head, "I am honoured by your presence," and he bows his head. Dean's eyes tighten and Sam wonders if it's jealousy. Dean was completely unfazed when she flashed him, and Sam can't help but think it's because Castiel was there, but now Cas is leaving, but he is treating Heather like royalty, like the Queen she is.

***

Heather decides to sleep on the couch, a luxury in the crappy motel room, with a pillow stolen from Dean's bed and a blanket from Sam's. She declares that she's not going to share with either of them and that they're both too damn tall to crash on the couch, and seriously, it's only one night and she's had worse.

Dean takes the bed by the door and god knows he sleeps badly, it means that he drinks heavily of a bottle of cheap bourbon, sharing a single glass with their uncomfortable house guest who coughs when she swallows, and keeping the rest of it from the dog who seems more determined than Dean to get completely smashed. Instead Dean gives it half of the beer he's using as a chaser, poured out into the lid from the pringles he bought Heather.

Sam doesn't think he'll sleep- his nose is full of the smell of her. Through the swelling and bruising she dominates him. It's as if she has painted herself over his skin, pushed fingers down his throat till all he can taste is her. But she's on the couch sleeping and he's hard, so he beats the pillow, turns it and flops down heavily. In his ear his Jessica is laughing, dark and dirty. Across in the other bed Dean is snoring, added with a funny little buzzing noise that means the dog is snoring too, twisted up in the hollow around which Dean has curled.

Heather throws back the blanket and he thinks she's going to the bathroom, but instead she steps out of the jeans, standing there in the practical panties Dean bought her and that blue Team Silver Bullet hoodie, and she sees him in the night looking at her, because she smiles.

She pads over to the bed, in those woolen socks Dean gave her from his own pack when she complained her feet were cold, and pulls back the blankets to his bed. She presses her finger against his lips and then follows it with a kiss. When he puts his hands up to protest she takes them in her own, straddling his chest, and pushes them up inside the sweater, to the soft fabric of the sports bra she was sleeping in so that his palms are over her breasts. She is not buxom, her breasts are small and firm, almost childlike, in his palms as she slides down his chest, slipping her tongue into his mouth.

This is his queen, he thinks, his equal and opposite, but she makes no complaint, one hand splayed across his chest, the other twined with hers on her left breast, when he moves his hand into the fabric of her panties. This is his Queen and he is simply claiming what is his, or maybe she is claiming what is hers.

"He won't wake," she says quietly, talking about Dean, "a little something in his beer," she bites his ear, pulling the lobe away from his head with her teeth, the pain is a wonderful distraction. She's as ruthless as all creatures of the Dark. He hasn't seen Ruby in weeks, had no relief but Jess, his hand and their mutual fascination with Dean and blood. Heather can fill the gap. Her tongue is snake quick in his mouth. Then she bites down on his lip, hard enough to draw blood and that just makes it perfect as she gasps and grunts, rubbing her cunt against him, and it's wet, hot and slick as her nimble fingers pull his cock free, jerking it once, twice, before she pulls the gusset of her panties aside and forces him inside her. This girl is a stranger, riding him with hard grinding thrusts, biting at his bloody mouth, moving his hands on her breasts, she is fucking him and Sam has no question of that, but when she is done he will turn her, slam her against the bed, and take what he will, and she is his queen, she will not only take it, she'll beg for more.


	17. In which Gilby steals the show

Dean sleeps till very late the next morning, causing Sam to question what it was that Heather slipped into his beer. She's nonchalant however, and replies it was only a sleeping pill, if he's sleeping like this, and he is just sleeping, then he must need it. Sam tries to tell her that his brother hasn't sleep more than two hours at any stretch for years, but she doesn't seem to care, and Dean doesn't seem to want to be woken.

Sam aches pleasantly, that good sex ache, but the worry over his brother distracts him, she might have poisoned or cursed him, but when Sam tries to force Dean awake the dog growls at him, a teeth pulled back malice growl, so Sam backs off.

He leaves a note saying he's taking Heather out for breakfast and he'll bring Dean something back but when he gets back, maybe an hour later, Dean has showered and is missing with a note saying he's walking the dog and "you better have got me waffles, bitch." It's the most familiar part of Dean he's seen since he came back from his mysterious road trip.

Dean talks about those months, but Sam's sure he lies.

When Dean comes in, laughing at the dog who is running around his heels, in and out between them but with the surety of something that is confident that it will not trip him, "oh man," he says, "Oh sammy, you should have seen him, there was these rottweilers, or at least as big as them, three of them, and this little monkey," he bends down to scratch the dog between the ears, who rolls over in doggy glee, "chased them off with their tails between their legs. Seriously, king of the carpark, here, now, waffles!" Sam has bought him pancakes, and corned beef hash for the dog, not sure what else to get him.

Heather crosses her legs in her badly fitting jeans, her bare foot sticking out and toe pointing at the dog. "He came from the Otherworld," she said, "the Other version of the town, what kind of dog do you think he is?"

Dean just grins at her, the dog tilts his head, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth in canine bliss, "do you think he's the first supernatural dog I've met, he's not a Hellhound the size of a horse and hasn't bit me, I consider that a win." He got up from where he was knelt on the hideous motel carpet before opening the polystyrene boxes on the table. He splits both portions in half, giving the dog half the pancakes and taking half the hash for himself, then putting one of the boxes on the floor, Gilby tucks in with as much abandon as Dean himself. "I tried to contact Wayne, couldn't get through, will try again in a bit," he says through a mouthful of food. "See if he can put you up," he looks at Heather, "there are all those women there, I'm sure you'll fit straight in."

"Whatever," Heather sneers from her chair, "I'll be fine on my own." She looks at Sam for backing. She doesn't get it.

"I've done Hell," Dean says and he sounds dismissive of it, like it's nothing much, "I'm sure that you're version of it was milder than mine, and sometimes you need people who'll understand, or you'll go mad and start going Hell on those who can't understand." He washes down a mouthful of toast with cold coffee, "if Bilquis puts you up you'll be set, Wayne's good like that."

"You have no idea who i am," Heather is angry, "I could be a serial killer, I could be a member of The Order, I could be a demon."

Sam laughs, "if you were, we'd kill you and burn the body." There is a thrum of sex in the glare that Heather gaves him. It vibrates in the air between them.

"The Order will search for me, they'll bring anyone in their way to the Otherworld. Will you put this friend of yours in danger?"

That is obviously the best joke that Dean has heard in a long time, he laughs loud and long, mouth open to show half chewed pancakes and syrup. "Oh, you make me laugh," he says finally, wiping actual tears from his eyes, "Sammy, you have got to keep this one." It also says a lot to Sam that Dean isn't trying to take her for himself, even though he clearly can't feel the strange red thread that seems to exist between Heather and Sam. It says about how Dean thinks of Castiel, that he considers himself taken, not even to look at a girl as lovely as she is.

Dean pulls out his cell and speed dials on speaker phone, after a few rings a man answers, "Queen of Sheba."

"Wayne," Dean says sitting at the table, the dog stood on it's back legs beside him begging scritches, "you don't need to answer your cell like that you know." He lifts the dog up unto his lap, and although Dean seems amused by Heather he seems to have adopted her demon dog.

"Habit, so, you normally check in on Wednesdays, and today is," he is quiet for a moment, "tuesday so i don't think you want to chat."

"Actually, I wanted to ask a favour, a friend of mine has gone through a real tough time and I was wondering if you could ask Bilquis if she could stay over." The dog makes a noise, "she has a dog as well."

"How tough a time," Wayne sounds like he's mulling it over.

"Seven years in the outskirts of Hell, seven years our time."

Wayne lets out a low whistle, "fuck," he says finally, "Bilquis would say yes if we had the room, and we won't for a month at least, i'd ask if she could stay with you that long, I mean seriously, they were fighting over who was sleeping on the pool table last night, and most of them are effin gods, they don't need to sleep." He lets out a loud sigh. "Right, let me think, let me think." He stops. "Actually, Hathor's here at the bar, I'm going to put you on hold while i get her." The line goes quiet.

"Who's Hathor?" Sam asks.

"Best doctor in fifty states." Dean answers calmly, "world expert on PTSD, should have thought of it myself, this is where Bobby would call me an idjit." He moves his hand from behind the dog's ears to under it's collar, continuing the mindless scratching.

"Dean?" a woman's voice says from the cell on the table. "If you aren't the biggest fucking idiot to walk the Earth I'll eat my fucking hat, and I like that hat, so I'm fucking glad you're a moron, seriously, I bet I could shine a fucking light through your fucking ears and use it to read the paper on the other fucking side, fucking monkey's, I doubt they have a fucking brain cell fucking between them," there is a pause, a crackling sucking sound, "and if they fucking did, you didn't get any fucking access. Seven fucking years, Dean, seven. Now take me off speakerphone, because I can hear your fucking brother snickering from here, and let me talk to her, and dear," her tone changes, become soft, "we'll talk outside in the sunshine, alright?" Heather lifts the phone, still wary of it's size - it's so small she had exclaimed - and closes the door behind her.

"So," Sam starts, "that's Hathor." Dean just nods, and really that does say it all.

***

At Dean's suggestion, sprawled out on the bed watching Dr Sexy reruns, Sam takes Heather to the local mall. They are in a suburb of Buffalo but the mall is big enough for the whole city. Outside it Heather quakes, her hands clutching the passenger seat in true terror. "It's where it started," she says, "a mall, Claudia came and the mall fell into the Otherworld, she'll come again, she'll find me, she'll bring me back."

Sam puts his hand on her thigh. "You said you killed her, you said she was dead, she can't find you, she can't take you back." But he thinks they might be platitudes.

From the footwell a small green hand pops up, offering a ring. "Psst, boss." Jeremy hisses, "here." The ring has design of two hands holding a black heart with a crown, he's seen the design before, it's hardly unique, but the stone glitters and shines with an oily blackness that is obviously the Darkness. It seems his minions like his queen as much as the Boy King does.

Sam takes the ring, it is more than a mark of his favour, the Darkness offers her protection. "If you are in danger," he says and it's the Boy King speaking, as it often is to her, "find the shadows and the ring will protect you. I am not so powerless that I cannot reach out."

"Your brother doesn't know, does he, about the shadows?"

"No," Sam says, "my brother has his secrets and I have my own."

The look in her eye becomes lascivious then, and before he can think they are in the back seat of the impala, her jeans around her knees and her thighs bent as he fucks her, biting at her lips, careless of who can see them from the car park, obsessed with the taste of her; the feel of her, hot and wet around his cock, and the tininess of her in his hands.

***

The mall is an exercise in normality, neither of them quite ready for it, but coping better than Dean who declared he'd rather have his eyelids peeled off than set foot in one of the places. The food court is busy, people wandering about with trays of over processed and over priced food, the wafting stench of deep friers and pizza ovens, and the sticky sweet smell of coke syrup, with that is the sharpness antiseptic cleaner on the floors, and sour lingering body odour. Heather looks fucked out, pupils blown, lips swollen, but hair perfectly cut into a deft pixie by one of the salons here, Sam wonders if she'd let him take her into the toilets for a quicky. It's nothing to do with lust, but ownership. He wants to mark his claim all over her, to come across her throat, to rub his scent all along her and be marked in return.

"Sam I am," Reigert says sitting down at the table. He is a tall man in a long black coat, unremarkable but there is something not quite right about him; something that smacks of _other_ and wrongness. He flicks out the coats of his tail as he sits at the table. "Heather," he bows his head, "I am honoured to meet you."

"Reigert," Sam says but Heather tilts her head quizzically, a gesture very like Castiel's in fact. It must be something she learned from the twisted angel in the otherworld.

"Sloth," she says and Reigert bows his head.

"I am honoured my lady recognises me." It is a formal declaration. He looks around and catches the eye of a teenager, "two frozen coffees, one with an extra shot, the other with extra vanilla. Go." It is the most wasteful thing Sam has seen the power used for. Dean would snark about them not being the droids that he was looking for.

A woman comes over in a sleek black wool dress with a gold belt that matches her stiletto sandals. She is amongst the most beautiful women Sam has ever seen, including in movies and magazines. Her make up is perfect, her hair perfectly styled. She does not look like she belongs in a mall, let alone the food court.

"Vanity." Heather says.

"Dean and I exorcised the seven sins." Sam protests as the teenager brings back Reigert's frozen coffees, and Reigert presses a five dollar bill into his hand and waves him away.

"There are many demons who seek our titles without knowing what it is to be us, Boy-king." The woman, Vanity, says. "I heard they made a family sit until they starved to death, that is not sloth, the act of sloth is that man does nothing in the fight against evil, or to act for evil in the name of good." She licks her perfect red lips. "Vanity is the promotion of the self against any other, even who you should be. When a girl starves herself to death to be beautiful she does it in my name. Is that who you fought, Boy-king?"

"My name is Sam," he protests.

"Your name is Sammael." She corrects, wrapping her lips around the straw of her frozen coffee, the one with the extra shot of espresso, not the one with vanilla. "And you are our boy-king, acknowledged but you can only become our king when the Lord of Emperors announces this, and you, Lady Asphodel," she looks at Heather, "you will be his queen, and manage his court whilst he brings together the duchies of Hell. You will bear his spawn and they shall be raised like angels of men. Those are the prophecies. We shall be your generals, but for now you are merely slightly more than human. The Corruption that consumes you makes you worthy of our interest, but when the Lord of Emperors comes he will step aside for you."

"What does Lucifer want?" Sam asks, he can't resist the opportunity, Vanity is offering him answers he must seek them out.

"What does anyone want, Sam?" Reigert answers leaning back in the chair. "We are here for Lady Asphodel." Sam's hand tightens on his knife. "Don't worry, you were looking for someone to put her up, away from the Order, we're happy to do it. We have a hotel room put aside for her in Lake Tahoe," he looks at Heather, "and you can have anything you want, for you are to be our Queen."

"What assurances do you offer?" Heather buts in, "for my safety."

"I swear on my very existence, of each use of my name, that no harm will come to you whilst I stand to prevent it." Reigert says and he sounds strangely genuine.

"May even I be struck down with pox if I do not stand to your name and banner, Lady Asphodel." Vanity says, "of course we'll have to get you some new clothes, you look a mess, I like your hair, but....." And that is it, Sam can trust their promises, Angels don't lie after all, even those as fallen as these. He can trust them with her, even if it goes against everything he stands for. "And of course we'll have to fetch your little dog, he's cute, I like that he's not the usual zeitgeist. I trust Dean will not stand in our way." She sounds sort of hopeful that Dean might put up a fight so she can hurt him.

"I'll call ahead, tell him what's happening." He looks at Heather. "Is this what you want, Heather? I mean the penthouse in Tahoe and all that, Hathor said you could stay with Horace and Seth and her. You have options."

"Can i," heather starts, "can i call people, I mean, can I go out, you're not going to trap me there, are you, because if you are."

Reigert laughs. "You will be our queen," he says, "it kind of means we have to do what you say, as long as it won't get you killed we have no problem with what you do. But no lovers, you belong to him, at least in that aspect, well, within reason," Reigert's grin is sharp and cruel, "well, nothing you could get pregnant from," he continues, "the rest of it, is up to you. Do you want to leave with us now, in V's limo, or to collect your things from the motel first, that way you can drive back with Sam-I-am." He leers a little, it's just as cruel as his other expressions.

It is clear to Sam that Heather's choice was made before he took her from the town. She elects to let them pick her up from the motel and in the impala, with her back arched Sam marks her with his tongue, bites and sucks her labia into his mouth one by one, licking and sucking her clit until she is literally screaming for him with her thighs around his neck, pushing him closer. He doesn't stop, and if the Satans find themselves waiting let them wait.


	18. In which Dean learns something he didn’t want to know.

Jess is hungry, she sits on the edge of the bed, her face shifting into something horrible and unholy, as she starts to bite at her lips, pulling them free with her teeth and regrowing it to do it again. "I'm hungry." She whines, "so very hungry."

"I sent the imps out to eat, why are you still hungry?" Sam says turning around in the barely lit motel bedroom.

"I am not the imps," she whines, stretching, out towards him, "I cannot feed like they do, where is the demon, where is she? I'm hungry." Her face is twisted, no longer the girl he loved, lips curled into an ugly leer, her nails brought up to scratch at her eyes, "I'm hungreeeeeeee," she drew it out, "where is the demon?"

Sam roots around in his pack and pulls out a silver flask which he uncorks and brings it to his lip. It's empty. He tries to shake it out, then goes into the bathroom, filling it with water and then gulping it down to get the very last drops out. "Saaaaaam," she whines.

"I'll call her." He says. "It's okay, I'll call her." He pulls out his cell, but it runs straight to voice mail. He cuts the call and tries again. Then again. Then again. He's just getting her voice mail over and over again.

"We'll hunt," Sam said turning, "we'll find you some demons, we'll feed, it's okay, Jess, we'll feed you, you just have to wait."

"You ask and ask and ask," she whines clawing at her arms, "I want so little in return, I'm hungry Sam, so very, very hungry. I want her, sam, I want her, I want her blood, I'm hungry, I give so much and I'm still hungry."

Sam takes a deep breath and then flicks on the light, he is part of Jess, she exists within him, but she's scaring him now.

He dreams of a red plain with a strange purplish light and rivers of blood, there are great mounds of bones that clearly belonged to a mythical beast. Fires erupt from craters in the ground with loud belches and smoke. There is a tower in the desolate place, and around it are battlements of bones and tusk, tattered flags flutter and snap in the wind. His view point, in the dream, is tracked like the spirits in the Evil dead movies, rushing like a runner but too quick and too fluid for human eyes. There is the human skeleton of a knight lain across the doorway, a horn in his hand and his shield bearing the image of a chaffinch holding a mace in it's feet, wrapped in thorns. He knows he should recognise it but he doesn't.

The doors open to his approach, there are smoky torches in sconces along the walls and the flag stones are wet and shiny. Behind him the knight climbs to his feet and lets out a tarantella to announce his arrival then falls back to the stone at the door with a clatter.

There is a sort of reptilian hiss, the sussuration of dry scales rubbing against each other, something behind the walls which stink of old animal fat, and something dusty and musky. The doors all open to his entrance and there is animal chanting, the beating of drums, the thumping of bones and stomping of feet.

The last door is surrounded by mirrors, the surfaces of which are like dirty black stone, but the frames were tarnished gold and greenish copper or bronze. There is a throne upon which Heather sits, wearing a black mist around her brow instead of a crown, "you come back soon, my love," she replies standing up, silk falls around her slight figure to reveal a golden cup over the very tip of her breast, "perhaps the war goes well."

"My hunger for blood is temporarily quenched, my other hungers intrigue me." It is his voice and he can feel armour heavy about him as his hands reach out to undo it, letting his breastplate fall to the floor with a clatter.

Heather laughs, a dark dirty sound, "I have prepared a cup for you to drink, meat for you to eat, and for your Darkness," she swings her arm to reveal a demon, tethered and bound, "a gift." She stands up, walks over to the demon, wearing a human meat suit, and lifts a knife, then she slits the demon's throat.

Sam wakes up with a start in pitch darkness, the bulbs exploded in their sockets, glass tinkling to the floor. Dean sits up, still mostly asleep with his gun in his hand. "What the fuck?"

Sam is suddenly ice cold and clammy, like damp moss is pressed around his skin, "just crappy electrics," Sam says, "bulb blew, go back to sleep, Dean, it's just."

Dean makes a happy harrumphing sound and goes back to sleep, his gun slipped back under his pillow with a practiced motion.

Heather gave Sam three bottles, one a thick red liquid like blood that won't coagulate, aglaophotis a liquid used in the exorcism of evil, a single drop could drive any possession from a body, no matter how powerful the demon, and incredibly rare. The second is a white powder with a handwritten label called White Claudia that Heather told him would reveal hidden things and was used in ceremonies to perceive the true face of god. She told him that if he took some, and a few grains would do, he would be able to see the true form of demons. The third is more mundane, a powerful sedative that he's been slipping in Dean's beer so he might sleep more. It speaks volumes of Heather that she had three hospitals to raid over seven years and only took the Ambien.

He imagines she helped herself to the gauze and bandages as her skin is marked with scars. That might be the excuse for the Batman bandaids that have appeared.

He climbs out of the bed as Dean sits up and says "demon omen," proof that even half asleep he's a capable hunter.

"No, Dean, just crappy electrics," Sam repeat, "go back to sleep," and drugged, half asleep and pliable, for once, he does.

Sam gets up, sweeps up the worst of the glass with a piece of paper as a dust pan and dumps it in the trash. He'll complain about it in the morning. The alternative is that he wakes Dean with the owner coming in apologising he has no idea what happened.

He gets himself a glass of water and looks at the bed. He's not going to get any more sleep tonight so he might as well read. He sits until dawn at the laptop ignoring Jess and her insatiable hunger. There is nothing he can give her right now.

 

The next night he dreams of Heather again, this time she sits at a table next to him and facing him are the seven satans, those he recognises and those he doesn't and they are talking politics. She is wearing a shower of gems and only gems held together by chains and there are more stuck to the skin of her face and hanging from her hair. She has never looked more beautiful to him than like that, in her power, as she commands the seven generals of his army. He watches her as Belial comments on the lust rippling off him. It is true, he lusts for her.

Afterwards she doesn't lead him to her bed, which is the usual state of affairs between them, instead she turns in the doorway and asks about Jess. The creature appears from his shadow, Jess but not Jess, something other, something stronger, the thing that Jess will become but still with Jess' face and body. Like Heather she wears gems but where Heather's are diamonds Jess wears onyx, obsidian and haematite. It shimmers with sound as she moves, and Jess has never walked, she glides.

Sam wakes later sticky and sweaty his cock actually sore in his pants. Jessica is hungry and she sits in the darkness, eyes glowing as she stares at him.

 

"Dude," Dean says in the car, "are you coming down with something, 'cause there's tylenol in the kit if you are." Sam's cold, so cold, and shaking, but his skin is hot to the touch. He feels so hungry he might be sick.

"I'm good," he lies, "probably nothing."

It doesn't feel like nothing, it feels like ants under his clothes, it feels like knives twisting up his stomach. Even the hard skin on his feet is crawling. Jessica's hunger is overwhelming him.

"Yeah, see if you can get some sleep, I'll get you some coke at the next stop, don't want you yakking all over my baby." He smirks to himself, "do you know who can yak, I mean seriously, Cas, it was like something out of the exorcist, whatever you do don't feed him eggs, they're no sooner down than they're back." He sniggers, "he didn't know what was happening, but I didn't know whether to help him or laugh."

"That's good," Sam says but he's not listening, he's feeling hunger crawling up his throat. "So, you think this might be a demon nest we're going up against."

"Not if you go all Team America on me," Dean answers, "it can wait till the morning."

"Dean, how many more people will die, I'm okay, I'm just tired and hungry. What is it, two demons, three? We can ice them and get something to eat. Some food and some sleep and I'll be fine." Dean looks skeptical, but he agrees.

 

There are five demons in all, and in his head he can hear the imps screaming blow out the lights, blow out the lights, but he doesn't think, the blood doesn't let him think. It overwhelms him and it's all he can smell, hear, feel taste. His hands are on the demon and his mouth on the wound, determined to feed. Jessica is shrieking in his head like the klaxons in Heather's little town and the blood tastes like sunlight but still of crap. No matter how much he needs it it tastes of burnt matches and copper pennies.

It's only later that it occurs to Sam, when he's drank his fill, that Dean is watching on in horror.


	19. In which Sam finally learns some uncomfortable truths

Sam shouldn't really be surprised that Dean puts him in the panic room, but he is, most of all for the spot light that Bobby has installed over the fan in the ceiling. There are slashes of darkness when the fan turns, but nothing else, not enough for the imps to manifest and fill the empty room.

The only things in it are Sam, a bucket and a narrow military cot.

There's not even a book to help him pass the time.

Even under all the light Jessica is eating him alive. The few mouthfuls of blood he managed were not enough to do other than wet her palatte, and Sam can feel her emptiness within him.

By the third hour in the light he's vomitting uselessly, empty retching over the bucket, on his knees, legs splayed, and when he's finished, stomach aching, throat sore, there's a plastic water bottle on the bed. He didn't hear Dean come or go.

He's lost track of the time, his stomach an aching emptiness within him and his eyes sandy when the first vision comes. It takes a moment for him to even recognise his mother, but when she opens her mouth she sings "shape your mouth to fit these words of war, I see the arrows falling backwards, yearning for a cause." Then she reached out and touched his face, and was gone between one blink and the next. Her words might as well be nonsense but they still bring tears to his eyes. Even in dreams it's all she's ever said to him.

The second vision is not long after. Castiel sits on the floor staring at him with that impassive cold gaze. "You are abomination," he says, "but your brother loves you." Sam rolls over on the cot and when he turns back Castiel is gone.

He sees many things in those days, himself as a child disappointed with his adult decisions, his mother, proud and dangerous, demons, angels, and a menagerie of things in between. He sees Balberith curled up on his pillow, "our souls are a myriaad of wars, and you've lost, you've lost them all," the cat says smugly staring at him with his one yellow eye.

Other times he's privy to conversations that he is not present for, not overhearing as the Darkness but simply being there when he is not, these are discussions of war. He learns that Lilith is the one who created the Order that Heather so feared to control the creation of Hell's Queen before she learned of the plan to release Lucifer.

He sees candy coated facsimiles of the imps, recognisable even though they look like munchkins in pastel colours. They perform for him, a lavish and theatrical version of Fat Bottomed Girls.

He sees Heather, wearing only diamonds, others stuck to her face, a queen, a goddess. "Our child will be god." She says and he lays his head on her lap and lets her stroke his hair until he sleeps.

When he wakes the door to the panic room is open.

Dean is asleep at the kitchen table, sprawled over newspapers and half drunk cups of coffee. So Sam doesn't wake him, just slips by. Clearly he's not meant to be out yet.

Bobby finds him jacking a car, shotgun in his hands but Sam knows Bobby won't shoot, Bobby might want to, he might even need to, but he won't do it, and with the darkness around him like a blanket it wouldn't even matter if he did. The darklings are jumping and gambolling around the inside of the car and Bobby breaks in front of him, and for the first time in what could be weeks, he had no concept of time in the room, Sam feels omnipotent and rich, half drunk on power and half on the wet spring smell of the air. He pushes past Bobby into the car, and Bobby, so wise and beloved, just lets him, perhaps aware of the darkness within him, or aware that this is beyond him.

It's only on the interstate looking for a rest stop with a callbox that it occurs to him maybe he's still in the panic room and the world has gone away. Perhaps the very universe is a dream created to contain him, that the only person he can be sure of is himself because everyone else is as fictional as the imps cavorting in the back seat and testing the springs, mooning at passing motorists. The blood has driven him mad. Morality doesn't matter to the mad, so it doesn't matter what he does now.

Ruby gives him the address of a small local hotel, the sort that's family run and that he and Dean avoid like the plague usually. She's booked out the honeymoon suite and is eating fries from a basket when he gets there. He puts them down on the side, and lifts her, feeling the heft of her in comparison to Heather, Ruby is like a rag doll, pliant and fabric in his hands. Her blood tastes of sulphur and vitriol and pennies as it dribbles down his throat from a hundred razor cuts on her arms as he fucks her, thinking all the while that this is the last time, that it is flawed because she is not Heather. And he doesn't even like Heather, he thinks she's arrogant and standoffish, and she doesn't like him either, but it's not about that. it's about ownership and destiny and a hundred other things, and Ruby, Ruby is just meat who can help him kill Lilith.

It only takes Dean a day to track him, no matter how careful he is, and Sam thinks that maybe he got Castiel to do find him. They fight and there are words said that can't be taken back. Dean washes his hands of him and Sam wishes he could feel it, but he doesn't. He just watches his brother go and then follows Ruby to a safe house secure in the knowledge that his brother, useless and angelic in his impotence won't get in the way.

The nurse's possession is locked in with the same symbol that Meg branded into Sam's arm. Ruby says they need all her blood, Jessica has a better idea.

Sam says he'll do it, that he doesn't need her to watch, he doesn't want her to watch, and she seems to understand. She doesn't, she just think she does, she doesn't know about the Darkness. He doesn't know about Jess.

Jess doesn't manifest in her human form, instead she is a morass of snakes swirling about him. The demon on the table screams and screams but the tentacular snakes, long sinewy masses of swirling darkness that cavort like something out of a Japanese animated porn movie wrap around her legs, tied though she is to the table, and the largest of them, with teeth like daggers and glowing white eyes forces itself down her throat. He feels the heart of her slipping down like a lump of gristle. Then she starts, with the other mouths on the other snakes to eat.

When she's done Sam feels whole for the first time in months, overly full, enough to feel a little nauseous as he licks at the blood around his mouth and sucks the breath in with noisy gulps. It feels like auto erotic asphyxiation and he understands why people do it, learned it with Jess, the real Jess, the first Jess, telling him to hold his breath with her mouth on his cock.

He knows now that Dark Jessica will tolerate no other lover, she is his one and only, his forever girl, and Heather, she's his Queen, his alternate, his other, and Jessica is her only and forever girl too. He has a plan, formulated in that mad place between thought and deed when he was driving, when the world was a dream miles away, he's going to kill and eat Lilith, then he's going to eat Ruby too. He is Jessica, that is what he learned in the panic room, he is the Darkness, and Lucifer is the Darkness and Seth is, and Seth is normal, he feeds it and it goes away, he doesn't control it, but he placates it and maybe Lucifer can too, maybe he can. Sam doesn't know what is happening just that the world feels like it is going to explode into a shower of scarlet shimmering butterflies. Maybe it will. He doesn't really care right now.

***

Ruby drives allowing Sam to sleep, she thinks he might need all his wits about him, Sam wants to know what Jess will show him. So he turns and rests his cheek on the car seat. "It's all fucked up, Sam" Heather says, she's wearing a pair of jeans so tight they might as well be sprayed on and that awful hoodie that Dean bought her with it's anti-Twilight logo. She is supine along a white leather couch, there is a cup of hot chocolate on the table but her feet are bare. Sam thinks Heather is an arrogant bitch, but he might just be in love with her feet. She has Christlike feet and he wants to worship them, and wash them, and dress them in the most beautiful shoes and ribbons.

Daisy Ray sits on the side in a pool of shadow. She winks when she sees him.

"Lilith played us, she planned this from the start, and now it's too late to question it. Lilith built the town, Lilith created the mess that is Hell by exploiting their hunger for power. She made promises she doesn't have to keep. She will be a dangerous and violent over lord, she has no interest in the Human World except as a battlefield against the Silver City who cast her out. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and that's what she was, scorned by all of them, and cast out, used only as a chattel, raped and forced to bear child upon child to form an army. What mind she has is long gone in the face of revenge. The Satans have maintained the infighting to hold their rule, there will come a time when it is necessary to unite the kingdoms, to create a world where the demons cannot escape, where they do not need to."

She sprawls out a little more, her shapeless sweater riding up to show a pale flash of soft stomach, even a slight paunch. Heather has softnesses despite battle. In the window she is reflected made up entirely of blood and gore, a perfect recreation of some Dantesque creature. Even the clothes are the same. It's something Sam doesn't quite understand. It's part of what she is, of what Lilith made her.

"You need to wake up now, Sam," she says bluntly, "it's too late."

Sam finds himself back in Ruby's car, snuffling the last of the sleep away, but he is no sooner awake than he slips again.

This time the dream is a diner, the sort that has blended into faceless anonymity years ago, he can't remember one from another there have simply been that many. The Angel is sat in the booth.

For the most part the angels that Sam have encountered have a corporate look, like they have just left a busy law office at the end of the day, this one, with his black curls and thick moustache, looks more like Frank Zappa. He wears a dusty old tee and jeans and is drinking a strawberry milkshake through a straw but he is still clearly other in the way that the angels are. The demons can pass as human but the angels are just one step too far removed. "Hey, Sam," the angel says waving him over.

"Is this real?" Sam asks sliding into the booth, suddenly aware he is a child again, nine or ten, uncomfortable in skin that grows too quickly to adjust to.

"As real as these things get," the angel tells him and there is suddenly a huge banana split in front of Sam. "Do you know who I am?"

Sam shakes his head, "I'm guessing one of the Seven." He answers calmly, pushing aside the ice cream, this might be a dream but he has no hunger.

"No, I am Zophael, the angel of the between. I don't take sides." His tone is even and calm. "Perhaps your brother mentioned me, though we've never met."

Sam shakes his head. "There are things you need to know, things only I can be trusted to tell you because I don't take sides, I am perfectly neutral. I dont' prefer one thing over another." He even has a deep drawly Frank Zappa kind of voice. "Every prophet in his house, Sam, every prophet, but sometimes it's possible to arrange things, to negotiate, to twist, to put things in place if you know the prophecies."

"This is where you tell me about Lilith." Sam scorns.

"No, you want to kill Lilith, and it is too late to choose any other course of action. I do not know who twisted this turn of events, it might even have been her. Did you consider that?" Sam gapes at him. "The beast and the woman are seperate, the demon is old, Sam, and desperate to live, barely more than a primordial shadow snapping at the dark, but the rest, it is tired and yearns." Zophael scratches at his mustache, "Sam, it is my nature to know these things and not to judge. There is little left in Lilith that can be redeemed; she dreams of death and is terrified of it- that is her paradox. Your decision is moot in these things." He stops again, weighing Sam up with his eyes, "you want to kill her because you think it will give you control, you feel like you are in free fall and think that if you kill her you will be able to control something, anything."

The angel's sudden grin is vulpine. "Catherine of Aragon ruled England for twenty years whilst her husband played at war. It was only when the wars were done she was put aside. Remember that." His eyes are sparkling with mischief or malaise. Sam doesn't like it. The angel takes a large suck from the straw. "Heaven is not what you think it, and the Silver City has been closed for a long time, but perhaps it is time for the Black Ships to come." Sam doesn't get he reference, but he thinks that he might not be supposed to. "You can gather enemies into one army against a common foe, you can heal a great schism by supplying someone they can unite against." He pushes the empty glass away, "angels crave sugar, Sam, we use too much energy for your mortal shells to withstand so we can eat entire tonnes of sugar and still lose weight. You might have noticed that." But Sam hasn't, Castiel doesn't eat and Reigert just seems to like twinkies.

"the others don't fight against their natural enemy because they are too busy fighting themselves, they forget and accept what they are told. It has been a very long time, Sam, longer than you can imagine, it's easier to forget, you can forgive yourself for what you do not remember doing. We are cold and aloof, but amongst ourselves we are creatures of fire. I was nearly the one to salvage your brother, Castiel is not what you think him, the owls are not what they seem, Sam. Now wake up."

In the car Ruby is shaking him. They're here.


	20. In which Sam learns the truth about Lilith

The irony of the convent is not lost on Sam as he finishes drinking the bottle of demon's blood. It is a plastic water bottle with one of those hamster feeding tops but he's drinking directly from the lip. The blood is cold and clumpy on his tongue, he can almost taste the sulfur.

"Are you ready?" Ruby asks him. She suddenly seems small, even more doll like than usual. It is nothing he has noticed in her before, how delicate she seems in her borrowed body, even as he is aware of the corruption, the smoke and the darkness spilling from her, invisible as it is to the naked eye.

"I'm as ready as I'll be," he says and then the world falls away.

It is like when he appeared in Silent Hill but it is not Silent Hill that he goes to, he is still outside the convent, he can see it but it is like a wall of great black glass or transparent obsidian between him and the door but it works much like a television screen in that he can see into it, and there are visions there. Ruby is frozen as Sam watches, out of time.

There is an angel, or at least how his brain processes one. It is an old man in ancient robes, with an eagle nose, pointed chin and ring of silver hair like a laurel wreath. He stands over a human girl with long black hair and skin like honey. She is bound up in chains of solid light. She is beautiful and innocence. "I am Lilit, the handmaiden of Inanna." She tells him, "there is nothing you can do to me that will change that."

The angel smiles. "I have no intention of changing that, child, I have a different destiny in mind for you."

The angel is Sandalphon, Sam knows that with the eerie prescience these visions give. "You are the sacred whore of your goddess, I merely wish to use that, I only wish to change you, to make you useful to my cause."

The girl, Lilit, writhes in her bounds, her linen shift rising about her thighs to show a flash of her crotch, one of the shoulders falls down to bare a breast, her nipples are tan upon high breasts, she is young and lovely. She is little more than a child, with a mouth like a pink kiss and hair shining with oil and gold dust. "There is a war in the Silver City over your kind, but even those who fight for your honour hate you with a passion that is almost demonic. But our numbers are not infinite, child, with each soldier that falls the Silver City aches with it's void. Each time one of us dies fighting the demonic forces it aches and shivers. The City tears itself down and I have no interest in the divisions of my brothers, but the army I was created to command is depleted, you are a sacred whore, you will fulfil my purpose." He steps across the room to her, pulling the shift back up to her shoulder to cover her. "I need an army, and you can give me one, but first I must make a few changes."

He places his hand upon her, over her heart and Lilit starts to scream.

The vision changes.

Lilit, who will become Lilith, is older now, in a bath, a wide stone pool, with her legs raised in stirrups as men mount her one after the other. "Enough," Sandalphon says, "make way for the child." And in moments her stomach ripples and fills, and a child slips from her into the hands of the angel. Even as it screams, and minutes at most pass, he pulls out the placental mess, hands the child to a priest and then as Lilit screams and screams, from more than just birth pains. another priest opens his robe and steps into the water, between her legs and mounts her.

The vision repeats itself over and over again.

She begs for her goddess to save her but she does not.

He watches in the timeless place, through the black glass that is part of the Darkness, Sam knows that, he loses count of the children, always male, that are ripped from her, the men that slake themselves upon her to bear such children.

It happens again and again and again and again.

Thousands, maybe millions of times, without surcease or pause as Lilit screams. Interestingly she never loses her beauty.

Then one day one of the priests takes the time to brush her hair, long and lustrous hanging lank in the water. He asks her name, which has never happened before and she struggles to remember. She tells him in her own language, which the priest does not know, that she has never got to hold her children.

Even as another man rides her like a beast, he rubs her head and strokes her hair. When it comes to his turn he refuses. Sandalphon splatters him across her and the feel of the blood angers her. She starts to thrash, as she did at first, but the bonds are old now, and she is lost to him. She pulls the tubes from her arms and the chains from the walls. In her rage and madness, for she has long since lost her wits, she attacks. Her eyes are empty and blood dribbles down her legs as she slaughters everyone there. She murders all the priests and forces even Sandalphon to take pause.

Even with the tubes of his device hanging from her between her legs and from her arms she walks out.

For what he knows is years she walks, sometimes she is given shelter, clothes, but mostly men take advantage of her beauty, forcing her down and rutting into her, then taking the children that swell from her and dashing them on the ground even as she claws and kicks, their friends holding her down before they too take their turn. When they sleep she murders them, and walks on wearing their blood, and keening for the loss of her children.

Zophael had said that Lilith was old and mad, and Sam knows why, but he also suspects that this is the least of it.

Eventually she comes to the place she searched for, a river that flows beneath an old castle. She climbs the mountain barefoot and dirty, but still her lustrous hair shines like black pearls down her back. She is covered in old blood.

The old castle has a lord, whom she calls Pasha and he is no more human than she is, the castle is ancient and holy, she is dressed in silks and furs, jewels draped from her, but still none gleam like the madness in her eyes. She takes time there, a queen amongst them with the Pasha, who is no more human than she is now, and in the night she wakes screaming for Inanna who never comes.

One night, the goddess name still on her lips she walks into the very heart of the palace, down the steps into the catacombs, through them to the great labyrinth and Sam understands everything. She is making the one choice left to her, revenge, because the Labyrinth is the way to Hell.

She strips away the robes and the fur, she strips away the leather and the gemstones, and eventually strips away the flesh to enter it, and the darkness soothes her hurts and places children in her arms.

She lies there in the darkness amongst the asphodel, the first of the demons, as Lucifer pulls her to him locking away the last of the darkness, until only she remains, immortal, childless and obscene, and steps back out of the labyrinth into the world of men, condemning all she touches, rutting upon them to create the demons.

Her wits, or those of the darkness, sustain her though she is not a host as Sam is, she is transformed, altered, reborn in it.

She goes to men in the night and then when the children are born she coos to them, she whispers their names, most secret things and carries them down to hell on a pair of wings she creates out of the night. She creates an army to undo Sandalphon whose name she can't remember, and takes the human body of a child that men may not harm her as they have done before.

She hears a tale of Inanna gone to Hell to rescue her human lover, of how she is coerced to remove her vestments and her jewels and her weapons and recognises her own tale in it. She weeps but cannot remember why.

The wall of glass fades to reveal a stone angel with it's hands in prayer. Sam understands Lilith now, but he does not pity her. It is far too late for that.

With a thought he unleashes the Darkness and her entourage are destroyed. They are slumped against the walls.

Lilith still wears her dental hygienist, that bland blonde girl. Sam is drawn to blondes, he prefers them, but this girl with her tanned Nordic beauty, she wears a wedding dress all white and diamante, but she is nothing compared to Heather.

Lilith was the Queen of Hell for a very long time, mother of the demons, mother of the monsters. She has been supplanted by a daughter of her own blood, a princess of the Lilim, Lilith created Heather, bore her line and created the town that forged her. She has planned her own end. There are words said, Sam doesn't hear them, he raises his hand and gathers her power. He hears the doors slam behind him but thinks that it might be an after effect of his own power.

He can hear his heart beat, he can hear the darklings whisper and Jess' grunting sex moans, he can see Lilith as she speaks, but the only thing that cuts through the distortion of the power is Dean's voice.

Pinned to the altar Lilith laughs at him, laughs at his impotence, desperate for it to be over, terrified it might end. He sees her not as the blonde dental hygienist, he sees the girl held in Sandalphon's terrible machine. He sees the girl wandering searching for surcease, a girl raised as queen in more than one country, burned as a witch in just as many. He sees the girl ripping apart her own flesh that she might finally be free of what the angel did to her.

He closes his fist and Lilith collapses, falling to the left, blood spilling from her mouth.

Ruby talks to him, telling him of her glory, of the pride of the Lilim, of what he has done for her but all Sam can hear is Jess, as if she is under water, he can see himself answering her but it is the Darkness speaking through him.

Dean uses a piece of rock to ram open the door, he lunges at Ruby with the demon killing knife and Sam holds her back feeling the life slip from her with golden light.

Even as she flops to the floor, lifeless, empty and used, the light starts to erupt from the floor in a circle made by Lilith's blood. Sam can see the darkness in the core of it, the decisions are made, it is done, for good or for ill Lucifer is released.

The wall of glass surrounds them, a barrier between the light and them, over the door, but protecting them from it's glare. This is Lucifer's Darkness here, not Sam's.

In the centre, in the circle of Lilith's ancient blood rises a great dark crystal, more than large enough to hold a man, Darkness solidified, and in it a child stirs, an infant, wriggling and turning to show the shadow of wings. Then there is a second flash of light and they are in an aeroplane.

Dean has barely time to assume the usual _Ohmygodwhatisthecrashposition_ panic before the seat belt light flashes on and the captain is telling them that they have to make an emergency landing because of turbulence. To his credit Dean looks like he might be sick but all Sam can think of is that child, that winged baby inside the great black crystal of solid Darkness.


	21. in which lucifer rises

The hire car is cheap and cheerless, part of Sam is overwhelmed by the guilt he feels, after all he has just released Lucifer and kick started the apocalypse, but also that he doesn't feel guilty at all. He is saying the right things to Dean, asking for forgiveness, but at the same time he doesn't really want it. He doesn't regret what he's done, perhaps Jess' darkness will overwhelm the world, eating it from within one molecule in the time. Seth had told him though that it would mean he would never be lonely.

Sam's tired of being alone.

Dean is driving like a maniac, foot down on the accelerator, not even turning on the radio, the Impala is with Bobby in South Dakota and they're in Maryland driving to Chuck's like the devil himself is on their tail, which he might very well be.

Sam is saying the right words, he's asking the right questions, but he doesn't mean any of them. If he feels guilty for anything it's showing Lilith that last piece of compassion and killing her quick.

The lights are on in Chuck's house, but despite Dean's fears the house isn't totalled, there is a ruckus inside but not an archangel smiting the inhabitants ruckus, just someone noisy inside. Dean kicks the door open with his shotgun crossed over his arm prepared for the last fight.

Instead Castiel throws his arm out like a clotheline and stops him as a small child, wearing Castiel's trench as a cape, it's arms tied about his neck, launches himself off the back of the couch into a beanbag, arms thrown out exclaiming he is "Superman." The beanbag explodes as he lands on it, making the child laugh even harder as he goes to do it again, the polystyrene beads falling like snow on the carpet with Chuck trailing after him extolling a list of woes.

Dean slowly lowers the gun. "I thought," he says to Castiel.

"We all thought," Castiel answers, filling in the blank. "we were wrong. The child appeared and the Archangel left."

"Is that?" Dean asks, taking a step back, Dean has two instincts, fight and flight, Sam knows, and he has shifted gears looking at the child.

"Yes," Castiel answers.

The child having exhausted his game is rolling in the polystyrene balls all over the carpet, "it's snowing!" he says throwing them up in the air. The child can't be more than four or five, with soft brown hair and large expressive eyes, he has a mole on the side of his nose. He is wearing an old tee of Chuck's, belted tight like a dress with Castiel's tie and his legs are bare, but he has appropriated Castiel's coat to make himself into a super hero. The new game quickly exhausted he scrambles back to the couch, throwing off the cushions and digging through the couch crap that inevitably gathers. He takes a handful and with a rather innocent smile runs to Dean. "What's this?" He asks offering out his treasures. Dean balks for a moment, before the child reaches out with one hand and lifts a piece of some old food and goes to pop it in his mouth

"No," Dean says, "that's dirty," he drops to his knees, he takes the offending clump of crumbs and throws it over his shoulder, into the existing chaos, "and this is sharp," it's an old thumb tack, "you'll hurt yourself."

"Kay," the kid says and dumps his treasures into Dean's hands, then looks at Sam, grins at him, before going back to the sofa. He climbs on top and starts jumping up and down, little bare feet flying up and down. Then he stops after only a few jumps, "not as much fun as the bed," he decides and runs back into the bedroom.

"Oh god, no," Chuck says trailing after him.

"What the," Sam catches himself short of the curse, there is a baby present, "is going on."

"Lucifer has risen," Castiel says, starting to clear up the mess by putting the cushions back on the couch, "but he is not quite what we expected." He sits down heavily, "there is much to explain but I cannot explain that which I don't understand. I know you seek answers, we have had this argument many times, but I do not have the answers you seek, I must admit I seek them myself."

The child comes roaring out of the bedroom with a sheet over his head going "woooooo I'm a ghost," in his trail things catch in the fabric tumbling to the floor as Chuck lags behind him going "oh god oh god oh god," trying to prevent the worst of the damage.

Then it happens, something inevitable, the child stumbles on the fabric and falls. Dean is a stranger to Sam when it comes to children, he becomes gentle, delicate, and so Sam shouldn't be surprised when Dean steps forward to help him up, lifting him into his arms as he pulls back the sheet wiping the tears away with a callused thumb. "You look just like my baby brother," Dean says softly bouncing the child.

"I know," the child says, "I chose to." He wraps his arms around Dean's neck and snuffles into the leather of his coat, "I wanna," he says and then starts to sob, the manic energy turning to tired crankiness, "I just wanna."

Dean allows the child a pillow of his shoulder and sits down on the couch, taking the sheet the kid had worn and using it as a blanket. "I know, I know," he says, leaning back against the cushions so the child is resting in his arms, pillowed on his body, his hand huge against the small back, "sleep, now, little Lucifer, sleep." Then he looks at Cas, his eyes tiger bright and fierce, "if I snap his neck right now, will it end this?"

And Castiel slowly, sadly shakes his head.

"Could you do it?" Sam is suprised he's the one that asks, but he knows if Dean doesn't he will, with what he's done snapping the neck of a child really won't make that much of a difference. If Dean is right and this is Lucifer he won't even pause.

Dean just smiles as he uses his free hand to tug a little thumb from a little mouth, wiping away the little pool of drool before he tucks the hand beside the head and the child snuffles in his sleep. Dean is a den mother in a man's body, fighting this strange maternal urge with shotguns and knives. Sam's only slightly surprised that Dean has immediately adopted the child, even if he is Lucifer, because that's what Dean does.

"Then what are we going to do?" Sam finishes.

"I'm fucked if I know, Sammy," Dean answers, "I've been chasing everyone else's tail for months, god knows alone what the fuck is going on, but," he gestures with his chin to the child asleep on his chest, "this is it."

"I can explain." A blonde man says from the open door, he is wearing a suit, and is perfectly turned out, but has a ruck sack dangling from one hand. "I'm."

"Brady." Sam finishes. He hadn't expected ever to see Brady again, he hasn't been in contact for more than three years although he had been his best friend at college. He and Brady had shared everything at Stanford, Brady had introduced him to Jess, Brady had pulled all nighters with him over courses he had never thought he'd use again but at the time had seemed the most important thing in the world. Then Jess died and he tried to keep in touch but everything happened and he hadn't even thought about him for years.

"Nebeziel." Castiel says at the same time with a certain amount of disgust.

Brady has that angel otherness, not a demon oiliness. It's in the set of his head and Sam wonders how he never saw it before, that sort of shimmer glimmer that marks Castiel out in a crowd if you know what to look at. "Yeah," Brady says, "both. I'm here for the boy."

Dean's maternal softness becomes tiger fierceness, teeth bared and eyes narrow, one hand on the child's back the other clenching around the demon killing knife, and Sam can feel the Darkness coiling around him, hard and sharp, it's whispering tentacles turning to razor wire around the shadows of his feet waiting to lash out and attack, to do him proud even under the electric lights. "I don't think so, do you?" Castiel has a knife in his hand, a long white line, the chrome thing he used against Valtiel and Chuck is backing up for the door. There is going to be blood.

"I'm," Brady starts, looking at the three of them. "I'm not here to hurt him, or you." He says throwing the rucksack into the room, "I've got clothes and things. If he wants to stay with you I'm not in a position to stop you." He doesn't actually step into the house, standing fixed at the door, guarded. "I'm in admin."

"And Brady?" Sam asks, wondering about his friend.

Brady's grin is vulpine, as wide and wicked as Dean's own, a pants wetting grin, "you really wanna know, Sammy, you wanna think he's in here, screaming?" It's a challenge, he is throwing down his gauntlet, pretty sure he's going to win.

"He's not." Castiel interrupts, "very few humans can support our Grace, he wasn't one, he is wearing his corpse." He narrows his eyes, grip shifting on the knife in his hand, his angelic sword, bringing the point up for a thrust. "And has for a long time."

"Since thanksgiving the first year at college." Brady answers, "he overdosed, it was his decision, I was waiting," he looks Sam up and down, "not for you, don't flatter yourself." Sam has so many memories of Brady, good, bad and intimate, and now he knows that they are of this Fallen, this imposter in his friend's skin. "For him," he looks at the boy, "and for the Chosen." Castiel opens the bag with his foot revealing clothes for the child, some sneakers, and a stuffed dinosaur, spilled out on the rug. "He called me here."

"Why?" Dean asks.

"That's above my paygrade." Brady answers bluntly, "my job is to pick him up, to do what he wants. I'm not paid nearly well enough to mess with you three."

"'Rady?" the child says turning. "too loud! wanna sleep!"

"Yes, my lord." Brady says, "by your command."

"Lucifer," Castiel says, "you must offer answers in exchange for your safekeeping, your guise of childhood is known to be a farce but yet we indulge you. We will not so indulge your minion, offer us answers, Lightbringer, and we shall not kill him where he stands and know we are justified in doing so."

Lucifer yawns, covering his mouth with a tiny hand. "Meanie," he says finally, turning and sitting on the couch beside Dean. "Can't I, just a little longer?" Castiel's gaze is firm, holding him in place. "kay, I shouldn't be out, I shouldn't be free. I can't go back. I wanna be human, I wanna have ice cream and soda and pickles and run and play. I wanna see the ocean and the mountains and the sky. I don't wanna go back, I don't wanna fight, I don't wanna war." His small face is screwed up. "I wanna see the choice. I wanna tell the angels no, I wan'for the demons to go'way. I don't wanna!" He's crying. "I don't wanna."

"Then what do you want?" Dean asks, his voice even, he's saying the words no one else really wants to, stroking the child's hair to soothe him.

"I locked myself away," the child says, "I locked the door again and again and tried to destroy the keys, but I'm not what they want, they want me to fight, they want a common enemy," those words are curiously adult in the child's mouth, "so they won't fight themselves anymore, they want the demon king, but I wanna go to the beach, and drink a beer and see lions and tigers and bears and trees. I aint never seen trees." He takes a deep breath before he continues, "Michael hides and I don't wanna seek, I don't wanna fight. I wanna be free!" He wipes at his face, aware that he's crying and Sam's not sure when it started, but the image of the Lightbringer crying moves him in ways he doesn't like, perhaps it's, as Dean pointed out, that he's wearing child-Sam's face.

"Can I come in," an Arab child says from the doorway, the boy is sloe eyed and dark skinned, his hair cut short but he has a silver ring in his ear and is wearing the very expensive looking uniform of a prep school.

"Envy," Lucifer chirps happily, "you can explain."

"Sam." Castiel says cooly, "perhaps it would be best if you helped Chuck get himself a glass of water." The prophet, who clearly did not see this coming, looks like he's about to faint and is starting to hyperventilate. Sam guides him to the kitchen table where only a few weeks ago he tried to explain the geography of hell with a kindergartner's art project. Even as he sits him down, with a hand on the space between his shoulderblades he's listening to the fallen angels in the living room as they talk.

"It's very simple," Envy says lighting a cigarette with practised ease, "angel's don't choose and demon's can't." He sits down on the mantlepiece in a position that screams inhuman, that suggests a bird of prey watching a rabbit unaware of the hawk's presence. "It's all elemental really, angels live so long that they fear the result of choice, they might choose wrong and that makes them fallible, and you know how they feel about failure," he takes a long drag of his cigarette, the smoke pooling about him in dizzying eddies, "and demons, well if they choose it's their superior who takes the credit or the blame, so that's stamped out pretty quick, so really the only creatures in this universe with that ability are you monkeys. That's what makes you so precious." It's only vaguely sarcastic. "So there's a proviso, a loop hole, as it were, a get out of hell free card, a choice." His full lips curl into a leer "and that's where you come in."

"I'm supposed to make the choice?" Sam asks from the table, god knows Hell's been courting him enough.

"Hmm, ego much?" Envy's laugh is dark and dirty. "No, you, Dean, and rest assured, I wouldn't rely on you to choose the colour of toilet paper let alone the future of the universe," he rolls his eyes, "but the child is about to be born, or at least this generation's child." He takes another drag of his cigarette, "and Heaven, hell and a few million other things in between will do everything to prevent a choice that they have to abide by. Hell, they might even raise Lucifer and start a holy crusade." He waves his cigarette around, it's almost smoked to the butt already, "Michael sits in his tower doing whatever it is he does, Lucifer's in the pit, of course the peons are going to look for an out, a way to impose their own world order, and what's better than eradicating the entire species to make sure the choice isn't made. The kid needs a protector, someone unbiassed."

Dean raises an eyebrow, Sam can see it from the kitchen. "I'm not unbiassed." He says.

Lucifer laughs. "What are demons?"

"Dicks," Dean answers.

"And angels?"

"Dicks with wings. Oh." It clicks into place.

"It's in my best interests that the choice is made," Lucifer says, his tone is strangely adult and the words perfectly formed which they hadn't been before. "Even if the choice isn't in my favour. I choose, Winchester, and I choose to go somewhere sunny and live out a human life doing human things on the beach. I don't want this war, I never did, I just want left alone. The child will be born soon, my coming will have hurried them along. I can provide for you a place, free from the eyes of Heaven and Hell, to raise the child as a human child, so when she makes the choice it is theirs alone."

"And what about me?" Sam asks.

"You made your choice, Sam-I-am," Envy laughs, "the forces of hell await their boy king, when you're ready. Come join the party, you've chosen your queen, the rest is all logistics."

"You want me to look after this child, why me?" Dean asks and god help him if Sam doesn't think it's the most intelligent thing Dean has said in years.

"Because," Lucifer answers, "you have a heart as big as a mountain, and you give the best hugs, and lots of reasons. You can say no, yanno, you can choose."

"And if i want to go with you to the beach?" Dean sounds like he's considering it.

"I'll get the sunblock," Envy says, "something tells me you have thighs that I'd love to rub the cream into."

Castiel growls, literally growls. "He is mine." Like Sam hadn't realised that. "How long do we get to choose?" And just like that Cas include himself on the plan.

"I'd give you world enough and time," Lucifer says, "but the child is due, two days and then we will be there for the birth. You don't hav'ta say yes," his speech is reverting to that of a child, "but you can stay there, safe, and raise them, away from every'fin."

"I need to think about it," Dean stammers.

"By your command," Lucifer says and then hops down off the couch, and raises his hand for Brady to take, "come on, Envy, Brady, let's go, when you're ready, let me know."

But Sam already knows the answer, he knew the answer all along, as soon as he was told the choice, Dean will raise the child because it will protect humanity and he can protect it. Dean might prefer to hunt, but he'd sacrifice himself for humanity in a heartbeat.

***

With Lucifer comes the morning, unnannounced and unwelcome. He doesn't knock, or wait for them, but instead launches himself on Sam's bed, Sam is in the shower, and proceeds to bounce until Dean lifts him down with the admonishment he'll hurt himself. So Sam leaves the bathroom with a towel about his hips as Dean is holding the child above the floor and explaining to him using short words that it really is too early in the morning for this kind of shit, and that is the word he used.

"Gotta go," Lucifer says with a grin, "she is being born, can you not hear it," he casts his head back in glee, "they tried to force it, but I'm cleverer than clever and I found her, she is being born. I'm sorry, Dean, there's no more time, do you agree? Will you raise the child as you see fit?" Sam quickly pulls on jeans and a tee, slipping his feet into his shoes without socks or lacing thme.

"yes." Dean answers calmly, "I'll raise her to bring down the lot of you."

"If you want," Lucifer answers, "but we've gotta go now."

Then with a flash that more Darkness than Castiel's blinding light they are in the hospital. Castiel stands there looking lost, because he has been included on this plan. "Excuse me," the nurse asks Sam, "are you the father?"

Dean licks his lips once, twice, a third time, "no," he says, "I am." And it's true but he's never met the mother, this is Lucifer's taunt and gift all in one.

"She's asking for you, if you'll follow me." And Sam goes to go but Lucifer stops him, with a shake of his head. Castiel ignores the other angel and just goes in regardless.

Sam doesn't know much about childbirth, he's under the impression it always takes a long time and is very difficult so when Dean comes out less than half an hour later looking grey and tired Sam's surprised, he imagined it would take days. "It's a girl." he says and Castiel puts his hand on Dean's shoulder, "she's so tiny."

"And the mother?" Lucifer asks with that adult voice that he sometimes uses.

Dean shakes his head. "I have to, I have to fill in some forms, they let me hold her, she's so small, Sammy, like she could fit in my hand. They're doign tests, to make sure she's okay, but she's so beautiful, Sammy, and so small."

"Are you sure you want this?" Lucifer asks again, "if you don't I can find another."

"She's mine," Dean answers, "and I'll protect her from all of you, I'll bring you all down, I'll burn the very firmament of heaven to protect her. They let me hold her and she grabbed my finger, she chose me, she," he stops, "she's so small, Sammy."

Lucifer nods, then vanishes, leaving them to their paperwork and how Dean is listed on the birth certificate is not something Sam questions, Lucifer could rebuild reality if he wanted to, this is nothing.

"What are you going to call her?" Sam asks, terrified of the glazed expression on Dean's face, the proprietary hand on his shoulder from Castiel.

"Grace." Dean answers calmly, "her name is Grace, Grace Ellen Mary Winchester."


	22. In which there is clearly going to be a sequel

Sam takes a sigh before he says, "I have looked upon the face of hell, and it was a giraffe called Geoffrey," he practically throws the bags down across the motel room in which his brother sits, Grace cradled in his arms, "and every woman there wanted to know where the baby was, and why she wasn't with me, and apparently I'm not a very attentive papa for not knowing what size diapers I need."

"Sammy," Dean hissed, "she's asleep," In Dean's arms she looked like a bundle of bright pink blanket.

"Can I hold her?" Sam asked hopefully bu he knew the answer, the same answer it had been since Dean had taken charge of the child.

"No," Dean said, pulling the blanket back a touch with his finger, "she's sleeping. Maybe when she's awake," but that's a lie and Sam knows it, because he hasn't let anyone take her, even the nurse had something of a fight on her hands when she wanted to give her her innoculations. "Did you get the bottles?"

Sam lays out his treasures on the bed, "and there's a Moses basket in the car," he agrees ripping open one of the packets of diapers to show Dean that he got the smallest size available, which are in fact pretty damn tiny. There are other changing things, including a bag to keep all this crap in, powder, wipes, lotion, baggies. The sheer amount of stuff needed to keep a baby is overwhelming and he's pretty sure they never had this crap when he was a baby in the back of the Impala.

"Car seat?" Dean asked.

"Yes, let's just suggest we don't use this card again, it got a hammering."

"It's okay," Lucifer said appearing on the bed. "I've got it covered," he hands them an envelope with a brand new card inside, then dives into the bags on the bed pulling out a Hello Kitty plush that was about the size of Sam's hand, "can I have this?"

"No," Sam says snatching it from him and offering it to his brother, "get your own toys,"

Lucifer dramatically throws himself back on the bed at the start of a tantrum, but Dean raises an eyebrow at him, "worth a try," he admits, "I need a Mommy, Brady's fun, but he doesn't say no, and I can't be human without one parent, and Mommies give hugs, so I want a mommy. Any suggestions."

Sam's mind was blank but something obviously crosses Dean's mind because Lucifer bounces up, scattering rubber teats in cardboard boxes flying across the bed, "thank you, Dean, she'll do wonderfully, are you going to go there, can I come with?"

"Leave her alone," Dean enunciates the words carefully, "you have no idea how indulgent we're being in not killing you straight off."

Lucifer pulls a face, "like you could, besides, I'll hide my grace, I'll be a human boy with no strings attached, and I'll have a brother, the last one didn't work out for me, and she'll never know I wasn't hers."

"No," Dean repeats firmly.

Lucifer gives them a mocking laugh that suggests he'll do his own thing anyway, "but then you get to watch me, and make sure I don't, oh I don't know, bring on the apocalypse." He grins, "and you can't stop me, I wanna Mommy, and she will be perfect," his nose twitches.

"Lucifer," Castiel says coming out of the bathroom, he is carrying the Moses basket that Sam has just purchased so there is clearly some teleportation involved and perhaps Dean has asked him to come in from another room so as not to startle him. "You take advantage of the fact that people see your vessel and misunderstand what you are capable of."

Lucifer grins and there is nothing childish about it at all, "of course, brother, I have so few advantages left me, but swings are brilliant," that is a child's wide eyed wonder, "it's like flying, it's as close as they get, you must try it, Dean can push, if he ever lets someone else take the baby. Slides are fun, but swings are better. Brady got shouted at for having me at the park far too late, it was long past dark and I was having such fun and then this police man came and said it was really late and they wanted to lock the gates and we didn't kill him or anything, we went for icecream and Brady got me a bananasplit and I ate it all and was sick. It was brilliant." He slip slides between ancient angel and excitable child without warning.

"And look," he holds out his feet to show one red sneaker and one green sneaker that clearly don't match, "so I needs a mommy." He looks sad for a moment, "and I has bad dreams, dreams about," he gestures with his head, "and I don't wanna, so I need someone to kiss 'em away and hold me tight and a big brover to scare away the fings in the closet and unda da bed, and so I want," he has his eyes screwed up and is starting to cry.

If he thinks that Dean will put down the baby in his arms and tend to him, he is sorely mistaken. Nor does Sam give him the plush toy, Castiel is even less moved than they are. He is arranging a soft white knit blanket that Sam definitely did not get at Baby's R Us in the Moses basket with a few knit toys that he's not responsible for either.

They just let the devil himself cry himself out on the bed. "You're all mean to me," he accuses, "everyone picks on me," a black tar oozes out from him unto the bed and it's the first sign Sam has that Lucifer has anything to do with the darkness, and now he's using it for a temper tantrum. "You're all stupidheads," he says, snuffling and the ooze creeps out over the edge of the bed.

Dean looks the devil up and down and then laughs, "oh well," he says, "that's Sam's bed."

"What about Heather?" Sam asks, "can she be your Mommy?"

"no," Lucifer answers like it's the most stupid thing in the world, "gonna go, gonna get m'self Mommy," then the child is gone and his face suddenly looks very adult and cruel, "see ya in Cicero, Dean. I have something for you there." And then he winks out of the room, black tar and all.

"Son of a," Dean curses, then takes a deep breath and shifts Grace in his arms, "little, mother," all the usual curses are being cut off.

"She is too young to understand," Castiel says, "it is not until eight or nine months that she will understand words and repeat them."

Dean glares at the angel, "I just want to wring his little angel neck. Little..." in his arms Grace starts to fuss, "now I've woken her," he gripes, making cooing noises to the baby who really is too young to understand.

"Perhaps I," Castiel offers.

"It's okay," Dean cuts him off, shifting her so she is lain along his chest, "I've got her."

***

The drive to Cicero is reasonably uneventful, Dean didn't drive, just sat in the back fussing over the baby in the car seat who was completely oblivious to the whole affair except when he changed her or insisted that they stop long enough to give her a bottle. To Sam's surprise he didn't lay a blanket down on the Impala's upholstery to do so.

Castiel sits up front with Dean in what could only really be described as a sulk. Then perhaps ten miles to the next rest stop he turns and looks at Dean. "I know you," he says calmly, "I know your body, I know that your arms are building lactic acid from holding her for so long, I also know why you do so, but I worry that if you do not either place her in the basket soon or hand her to another to carry then you might either drop her, when your arms go numb, or crush her when they spasm. I am not prescient I cannot tell which will happen, but definitely one of the two. Perhaps it would be best to lay her down, and let her sleep outside your arms."

Dean is torn, because Castiel has very clearly out argued him, "but," he starts. "She's mine to protect, Cas."

"And you are mine," the angel is succinct, to the point, almost brutal. "therefore if you place her in the basket and try to sleep I will watch over you both."

"I'm supposed to protect her from Heaven." It's a mumble and Sam very nearly doesn't hear it.

"And I am to stand by your side against all comers, wasn't that what we agreed, that I would never leave again, and that I would hold no other loyalty than yours." Sam aches with that information, it's so much more than he expected, he hates it and is jealous, not just of Castiel for being the focus of Dean's affection, but of Dean for being the focus of all that love. "I will watch the child, and if I falter then Sam will stay the course, you are not alone, Dean, and how can you fight the combined forces of Heaven and Hell if you are tired and you have her in your arms at all times? Lay her in her basket or give her to me, no harm shall come to any of you." And Sam believes him knowing he is included in that, that Castiel will lay his life down for him, has laid his life down for him, and he feels unclean.

"We'll stop for the night at the next place." Sam says checking the signs, 9 miles. "Give you a chance to make up formula or whatever it is."

Sam's jealous, he knows that, but in the washed out afternoon light he can't even feel Jessica, he's jealous but for once it's all his own.

***

The motel is the same as every other motel they've ever stayed in, perhaps decorated in the eighties rather than the seventies but still using the same carpet and bedding. When booking them in Sam doesn't think to ask for a travel cot, part of him thinks that Dean won't let Grace out of his arms that long, but when he comes back to the car Castiel has the baby in his arms, the tie missing so it wont catch in her fingers or mouth. She looks like one of those gloworm toys he wanted when he was very small in her green fleece blanket and cap all scrunched up face and closed eyes. Sam really can't see the appeal but as Dean is so keen to point out she's tiny, nestled in the crook of Castiel's arms and dreaming her tiny baby dreams. Outside the streetlamp flickers once, twice before settling into it's steady orange light as the night comes closer.

A man crosses the car park and knocks on the door and it takes a second for Sam to recognise him as Seth, the man beside him though, tall and thin, hair dyed black and eyeliner, Sam has never seen before, but both of them stink of the Darkness. "Castiel," Seth says, "and ya gotta be Dean," his voice is as syrupy as Sam remembers, that slow southern drawl. "It's comin' for ya, get inside, now, go into the bathroom and lock the door, get into the bath and don't come out, no matter what ya hear, kay," he looks at Dean, "I owe ya for Horace so I'm doin' this when really I don' wanna get involved, capice, but it's comin' an it's bad, so in ya git, and don't come out until we says so, kay."

Dean blinks but Castiel has already crossed the room and yanked back the shower curtain. "What's coming?" Sam asks.

"The darkness," the young man with the black hair and eyeliner answers calmly and Sam is shocked to find it's Lucifer, because the last time he saw the angel he was wearing a child version of Sam. "It's simple, we three," he looks at Sam and then across at Seth, "are going to put it back in it's hole, and you," he glares at Dean, "are going to lock yourself in the bathroom and protect that child with every atom of your being. Castiel, brother," he lowers his head in a salute, "keep her in the light, please, she is worth more than you can imagine. Now go."

"What about me?" Sam asks feeling like he's been left behind, like he doesn't understand.

Lucifer grins, all teeth and torment, "You're going to help us fight."

**Author's Note:**

> Note on sources
> 
> There has been some complaints that I didn't cite all my sources for this story and I'm going to put my hand up and say it was deliberate.
> 
> "American Gods" was cited when the cross over was very deliberate, however when i found my feet in the universe it became more inspirational than dedicated, this doesn't mean you shouldn't read "American Gods" because you should.
> 
> However with World Enough and time the two main sources were The Darkness and Silent Hill
> 
> The problem there was that Sam made the correlation that he had inherited the darkness, but he actually hadn't as the story revealed. It manifested to him the way that it manifested in the comics (that Dean had referenced clearly in the first story) but it was not the same. In fact in many ways it's not even close. Sam's "darkness" is much more hands on than that of Jackie Estacado but the imps manifest for both. In many ways it manifested more as Jessica than it did in armour, weaponry, or any of the other details that featured in the comic or the game.
> 
> I referenced it in the text so I didn't reference it in the notes.
> 
> With Silent Hill I didn't reference it in the notes because I didn't want to spoil the surprise, truth be told. When my notes made it clear that Lilith would have tried to subvert Sam I kept getting stuck on the term "boy-king" and then the inevitable realistion that a king needed a queen and Heather was such a perfect candidate. You could like or dislike her on her own terms without her being a Mary Sue or even an original character. If I had have said straight off by the way we're going to spend some time in Silent Hill half of you would have avoided it for not knowing the story, and half of you would have run screaming going "nurses!" (it has that effect on people)
> 
> This story was to show Sam's corruption, which manifested as the Darkness because that's how Sam's mind interpreted it, but also how easily it was to seduce him, shown by the creepiest town in North America.
> 
> There are lots of hidden references in both texts if you know where to look and they're not always clearly stated. Dean talks about pie in Twin Peaks, for example, Reigert chose his name from the Prophecy films and Lucifer pretends to be superman.
> 
> I didn't state them all because Supernatural itself doesn't
> 
> I don't claim anything in these works, I have a catch all disclaimer. And if I reference something it's deliberate and if you're unsure, ask. You might find yourself reading a series of comics you've never heard of and enjoying it, which really just makes it all worthwhile.
> 
> SG


End file.
